Articles repérés par Hervé Le Crosnier

Je prend ici des notes sur mes lectures. Les citations proviennent des articles cités.

  • Facebook Turned Our Economy Into a Spying Operation | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/our-economy-based-spying

    George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton sold us on the idea that we no longer needed a manufacturing economy in the U.S. because the internet was coming and it would provide entirely new business models.

    Now we’ve seen what that new economy looks like: spying for sale.

    Facebook takes all the information you give them, which they then use to create profiles to sell advertising to people who want your money or your vote.

    Your internet service provider, with former Verizon lawyer and now head of the FCC Ajit Pai having destroyed net neutrality, will soon begin (if they haven’t already started) tracking every single mouse click, reading every email, and checking out every one of your online purchases to get information they can sell for a profit.

    Your “smart" TV is tracking every show you watch, when and for how long and selling that information to marketers and networks.

    And even your credit card company is now selling your information—what have you bought that you’d rather not have the world know?

    To paraphrase Dwight Eisenhower’s Cross of Iron speech, this is not a real economy at all, in any true sense. It’s a parody of an economy, with a small number of winners and all the rest of us as losers/suckers/“product.”

    While it’s true that Facebook’s malignant business model may well provide a huge opportunity for a competitor to offer a “$3 a month and we don’t track you, spy on you, or sell your data” plan (or even for Facebook to shift to that), it still fails to address the importance of privacy in the context of society and law/rule-making.

    We cannot trust corporations in America with our personal information, as long as that information can make them more and more money. Even your doctor or hospital will now require you sign a form allowing them to sell your information to third parties.

    It’s been decades since we’ve had a conversation in America about privacy. What does the word mean? How should it be applied?

    Just this simple transparency requirement would solve a lot of these problems.

    Business, of course, will scream that they can’t afford compliance with such an onerous requirement. Every time they sell the fact that you love dogs but have a cat allergy and buy anti-allergy medications, they’ll only make a few cents per sale, but it’ll cost them more than that to let you know what part of you and your collective body of information they sold to the allergy medicine manufacturers.

    And that may well be true. It will decrease the profitability of companies like Facebook whose primary business model is spy-and-sell, and will incrementally reduce the revenue to medical groups, credit card companies, and websites/ISPs who make money on the side doing spy-and-sell.

    #Facebook #Médias_sociaux #Vie_privée #Economie_influence