An amazing thing about both Facebook and Google is that employees at these two pillars of the surveillance economy see themselves as champions of privacy. And in a way, they are right—they guard user data as zealously as a dragon guards its gold. https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status/1022621096057556992 …
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At the same time, the business model that powers these giants is incompatible with democracy or human freedom. Their technical competence and ethical self-righteousness has removed any restraint on instrumenting their users' lives, or selling manipulation as a service.
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The upshot is that many people at Google and Facebook devote their careers to protecting privacy, and become angry if you accuse them of not valuing that privacy, while they have built out the greatest system for surveillance and targeted manipulation the world has ever seen.
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These companies hire some of the brightest minds in the world. And bright minds excel at rationalizing. Just like any cryptographer can write a code they cannot break, every programmer can lay out a bulletproof ethical case to themselves why they should work their cushy tech job.
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That is true! I spend a lot of my time aggressively pushing people onto Google services for this reason. Schneier has correctly called this a form of Internet feudalism—you need to pick a lord powerful enough to protect you.
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