This is a specious argument because it neglects to take into account information asymmetries and change over time. When Facebook was first launched, there wasn't any widespread understanding of the breadth/intensity of their data collection and its downstream implications.
People initially chose Facebook because it truly offered a novel and improved service, and the true cost users would pay for it wasn't obvious to anyone yet. The "wall", chronological friends-only feeds, etc. provided genuine value, and at that point the public at large were almost completely oblivious to how much personal data was being collected from them (and even less as to how it might be used in ways counter to their own interests). Once they'd fully captured the vast majority of user share, Facebook clawed back value by deprecating the chronological feed, serving ads and "high-engagement" posts in place of friend submissions, and generally ramped up their data harvesting significantly further since.
Most people would agree that the service is far worse than what they initially signed up for, but feel like there's no longer a viable alternative that would allow them to maintain the same level of communication with the people they care about.
Facebook users are not "choosing convenience" by staying on the only platform that all of their friends and family use exclusively. They're effectively held hostage by network effects that were intentionally planned and designed around producing that lock-in effect and guaranteeing that all potential alternatives either withered on the vine or were absorbed (e.g. Instagram). To the extent there's a "choice," it's a coerced choice on purpose.
> When Facebook was first launched, there wasn't any widespread understanding of the breadth/intensity of their data collection
Come on, you're trying to tell me that people didn't understand that when they give someone a thing, that someone has the thing they gave them?
> provided genuine value
Yes, the convenience.
> how much personal data was being collected from them
"They collected it; I didn't give it to them."
> but feel like there's no longer a viable alternative that would allow them to maintain the same level of communication with the people they care about.
Yes, "the pesky convenience is forcing me."
> Facebook users are not "choosing convenience" by staying on the only platform that all of their friends and family use exclusively.
"My friends and family are forcing me."
Despite my comments, I'm not totally against the use of Facebook, but I am against the surrender of personal agency and blame-shifting these comments are demonstrating.
It's true they collect more, but I wouldn't say "far, far more". They get the most from what you provide yourself. That's unless you have relationships that share too much about you.
Did they stop tracking people through their like buttons by now? If not, there's no argument - they're literally tracking non-users on every site they can! Besides Google, what company is doing as much tracking as much as Facebook?
Wasn't it just last year that it became known how Facebook and Instagram apps track your browsing through WebRTC? That alone is far far more than people knowingly give them.
Learning about their tracking web browsing through WebRTC ports from the apps, you have a point on users not knowingly providing that. Still, if you dissociate from Facebook (not having their apps, not being logged on, etc.) then that tracking would've been ineffective. The rest of my comment stands on their being able to leave it.
Legal doctrine that boils down to "trust me bro" isn't even bad doctrine (it's not proper doctrine at all), but I think the comparison is still valid here, because both sentience/non-sentience and art/porn may just be fundamental category errors.
Perhaps we can't define a "partitioning" rule because no valid partition exists.
For consciousness/sentience, that's an incredibly tough a pill for most to swallow; it would mean calling into question more hundreds of years' worth (probably more) of philosophical thinking, all of which was constructed on the axiom that "sentience" is a single indivisible trait: you either have it or you don't.
If we find that "root dependency" was little more than wishful thinking all along, a whole slew of Enlightenment-era philosophy (and all the modern legal principles derived therefrom) suddenly fall apart unless we find some other suitable criterion that would shore them up (or we just collectively avert our attention and pretend the conflict doesn't exist, which is the route I expect many would prefer to take).
I know! I should have made that clearer in my original reply. I think it's a bad line now in general, but an even worse justification for the ultimate ruling at the time.
> a whole slew of Enlightenment-era philosophy (and all the modern legal principles derived therefrom) suddenly fall apart
I don't think that's true. Pretty much all legal constructs hold up just fine under game theory regardless of whether or not you consider the world to be deterministic and have absolutely nothing to do with consciousness or lack thereof. Also note that a deterministic world isn't an argument against consciousness.
I'm not sure what you're referring to regarding game theory (that's a much more recent invention); a huge chunk of both civil and criminal procedure law hinges on the Enlightment-era notion of a "reasonable person" [0], and that becomes murky when humans aren't the only entities capable of reason and agency.
Was that really honesty? I'm sure some who were caught in the layoff were truly underperforming, but everyone has peaks and valleys in their output quality over the years, and tons of performance reviews are purely political (i.e. does your manager like you).
It doesn't read so much like "honesty" to me as it does arrogance and spite (which, to be fair, aligns with everything I've heard about their corporate culture). Fundamentally, responsibility for layoffs is always on the shoulders of corporate leadership; regardless of individual employee performance, each of them was vetted extensively and ultimately hired by Meta; the company could have elected to work with them to bring performance up to a higher standard (if you believe their claim that it wasn't), but instead they chose to amputate them en-masse.
It's not "honest" to punish and blame a huge swath of your workforce in a single stroke for your hiring and management mis-steps, it's cowardly and lazy.
You would rather infringe on the privacy of your community and invite a company known for indiscriminate multi-pronged dragnet surveillance (plates/faces/bluetooth beacons/etc.), with a nation-wide blanket coverage network that has already been provably abused by police on multiple occasions, all because of a handful of petty package theft cases?
I drive too even though there is a risk of death. The juice is worth the squeeze.
Except even armed with positive identification, the police won’t do anything. Laws with enforcement are worth nothing. Stalking and whatever else has happened with the data is already illegal. But who gives a shit without enforcement.
If you acknowledge that police regularly fail to act on crimes even with positive ID, why on earth would you allow a private company to collect all that information just for them to ignore/misuse? How is dragnet surveillance a fix for inept/corrupt policing?
Police have been granted wildly more powerful capabilities and arms over the course of my lifetime, but from what I've seen, those haven't improved their ability to solve crimes or better serve their communities nearly enough to justify their erosion of civil liberties; in my estimation, it's been an opposite trajectory, with violent escalations by police increasing and community trust in police decreasing (nearly monotonically) across the country.
Read the linked article; does that seem like "absurdly small" amounts of abuse to you? Besides, when we're talking about a surveillance network so vast you can't avoid it anywhere in the country, the law of large numbers kicks in: there IS abuse, and there WILL be further abuse at some level. The extreme reach of such systems means they should absolutely be treated as 4th amendment violations; the authors of that amendment could never have conceived of such a panopticon and its impacts on individual privacy and autonomy.
Many webcam mics have auto-gain enabled, so having it on in a silent room will cause it to crank the gain to the point that the noise floor becomes audible (or in this case, visible). You might want to try recording a sound clip to see if the same effect occurs (i.e. you can hear the static fade out when louder sounds like speech hit the sensor after a period of auto-compensated silence)
I think your example is stilted in exactly the direction that the anti-sideloading-as-a-term crowd fears is increasingly becoming normalized.
In fact, I think it's actually a perfect demonstration of how incredibly subtle and pernicious even small changes in the language we use can be, especially over a period of years to decades. Those changes are capable of reframing public perceptions in ways that inhibit our ability to recognize what would otherwise be obvious attacks on our expectations of rights and individual agency (were they couched in the existing terminology instead).
I would propose a modified counter-example to illustrate my point:
"Google is banning installation of apps they don't approve!"
vs
"Google is banning sideloading!"
This makes it clear what's actually happening: ownership of a Google device is no longer truly ownership. You are only allowed to install apps Google deems acceptable, and are denied the agency to install apps that are not. The device is fundamentally Google's to control; you're merely a user.
>In fact, I think it's actually a perfect demonstration of how incredibly subtle and pernicious even small changes in the language we use can be, especially over a period of years to decades. Those changes are capable of reframing public perceptions in ways that inhibit our ability to recognize what would otherwise be obvious attacks on our expectations of rights and individual agency (were they couched in the existing terminology instead).
>I would propose a modified counter-example to illustrate my point: ...
Which just turns into endless fight over wording, where each side tries to get the maximally sympathetic wording they can get away with, and decry the other side's attempts at rewording as "doublespeak" or whatever. eg. are they "illegal immigrants" (implying they did something illegal) or merely "undocumented" (implying they lost their documents or whatever)?
> Which just turns into endless fight over wording
Sure. One side benefits the users and the other benefits a monopoly. I don't work for that monopoly but I do use a smartphone that is locked to the monopolist OS.
This is either completely misinformed or disingenuous. Texas just had to freeze all data center development pending audits because their energy supplier (ERCOT) reported that it had received data center load requests totaling 474 gigawatts.
That figure represents ~40% of extant grid capacity for the entire country in just a single state.
edit: I'd also add that historically, power generation has accounted for 4% of all water consumption in Texas. The highest recorded load demand on the ERCOT grid, to date, is ~87.5 GW. Scaling generation capacity by 500% is not possible to achieve within a short-term time frame, but even if it were, the water demand of the additional generation sites would completely drain many critical aquifers and result in skyrocketing water rates for citizens of a state already suffering terrible droughts regularly.
5% of that might get built. Maybe. We are nearing the top of a giant DC build out bubble.
My guess is that there’s someone making money for getting DCs permitted. Like the paperwork done.
474 GW of capacity is silly woo woo land. I’m not sure you could get enough chips made to use that in the next 10 years. The cost of fuel or solar/batteries or reactors or gerbils or whatever they plan to use to make that would be bonkers.
Except it is coming out now that those audits are hollow. The fact that the AI companies are lining up to support them proves how useless those audits will be. Abbott just put out that order for political posturing leading up to the election. The entities responsible for implementing the audits (PUC & ERCOT) will drag their feet until after the mid-terms and if Abbott wins he'll conviently forget about them.
FYI for the creator, I'm hitting an error when attempting to change the mix-in font (Webkit/iOS):
reply