this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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I've worked in advertising for a decade and, while on the one hand, the industry indeed tries to track your every move, it's rarely done well or in a coordinated fashion. Ever wonder why it's still not possible to switch off ads for products you've already bought? Online advertising is mostly blind spam, which is why you will be advertised the thing you've just bought ad nauseam. If they had these ultra-accurate profiles of everyone, they'd advertise you something you haven't bought. Using a basic adblocker instantly kills 99% of an advertiser's ability to publicly gather your data. It gets more complicated in the walled gardens: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft etc. have an unbelievable amount of information about you, but they don't willingly share this. They use it to milk you within their walled gardens (do note, that in order to avoid Meta, you cannot use Threads, Instagram, any of their hardware, Facebook or WhatsApp).
Ultimately, it's still your choice whether you let them surveil you and it turns out people give these rights up willingly.
If you have an Alexa, it's your fault that Amazon can spy on everything your family says. If you've given WhatsApp your mobile number, then it's your fault that Facebook can read and analyse everything you've said to anyone on WhatsApp, connected to a near-perfectly unique ID against your name.
It is up to the users to not willingly provide this information. Trying to do this the regulatory way is all well and good, but it takes decades and the industry moves faster than that. And many countries don't care at all anyway.
You simply have to give up this dream of corporate ultra-convenience. You have to decide to live a slightly harder life: Linux instead of windows, open source instead of proprietary. Mastodon instead of Twitter, Lemmy instead of Reddit, etc etc
This puts too much blame on the users. Individuals do not have the power to fight international mega corporations. It also ignores that, regardless of who you think is at fault, adtech violates a ton of privacy laws, at the very least in the EU. If a company doesn't have a legal basis for collecting personal data, they are not allowed to do it. Especially if it is sensitive data like medical information, religion and sexual preferences.
I don't get why we have to defend these practices or downplay them.
Excellent point. I completely agree and should have perhaps put more emphasis on the fact that these practices are of course egregious and the onus should not just be on the user. There should be more public awareness of these privacy nightmares, however. Somehow people need to learn to start caring about this stuff, because if nobody uses Facebook, Facebook doesn't have the power to act the way it does.
You can't do much. You simply cannot not use a platform you actually need, Whatsapp is an example in Italy.
I've now been 2 years on Linux, but only because I prefer the system itself. You can't simply not use Windows for most, as unless you use very few generic programs you will eventually need to run a program that Wine will not handle. And talking about Linux, if you have newer Nvidia hardware you have no choice but to use the proprietary driver.
Full privacy online doesn't exist without giving out convenience, but that's honestly fine. In the end, its all about how much we actually need or want those services. The most important thing is finding the right balance between privacy and convenience that each of us feels comfortable with.
But it's end to end encrypted, so I doubt Whatsapp is able to read any messaging content. The meta data (who is contacting who, when from where) is probably worth enough for them already.
Has that ever been independently verified? I remember the WhatsApp founders quit over FB policy to use messages for advertising, but perhaps they've changed course on that. You're right, the metadata alone would be insanely valuable.
Don't think so, but it would be highly illegal in the EU if they would. Also kinda stupid, because they can gather enough information without reading message contents, like u said as well.
Fair point about the backups, but I was mostly referring to the messaging aspect. As far as I know they use signals e2e encryption protocol, so it should be fine for personal use. Would also be illegal for Meta to use message contents for anything really, as they say they don't.
If we are talking about activism, politics and so on, then surely Whatsapp is not enough. But I was mostly talking about the ad-related context.