The ability to aggregate personal information of large numbers of people is a form of political power. Facebook can, if it so wishes, provide a list of all gay people in an area; all supporters of gaza or of israel; all people who have recently commented on an article about drugs.

The very ability to provide that list previously required an expensive secret police; today it does not.

This is an extremely dangerous ability for anyone to have -- human rights (such as that to privacy) were won against oppression. They aren't optional, they're the system by which we prevent those previous eras from reoccurring.

This is why i'm suspicious of the being a meaningful sense of 'consent' here -- if enough people consent, then the tracking agency acquires a novel political power over everyone. This is why the infrastructure of tracking itself is a concern.

> The moral threat

Forget fussy debates about morality.

There is a practical threat to society when a few nation-sized corporations operate pipelines of data collection and profile aggregation on every online citizen of the world.

Those profiles represent a massive amount of power, and that power is being let to accumulate in opaque organizations that have no explicit commitment to public benefit and extremely little accountability. That power is not yet being weaponized, but it doesn’t evaporate just because nobody’s using it for leverage or control yet.

The responsible, long-term, practical way to ensure that legitimate governments and the people that constitute them continue to have the power to shape their own society is to make sure that these techniques for accumulating power are dismantled and the already-accumulated power is dissipated.

Yes, we will lose some novelties and baubles in our online life when they can’t track you anymore. Yes, investing new power into government so that it can counter corporate profile-accumulation is dangerous as well.

But the greater danger of inaction against these corporations is that they are already only lightly-accountable and are on the verge of escape from accountability forever if they gain enough power. Modern governments, meanwhile, are comparatively slow and dumb and can still be steered as their dangers become manifest.

Political manipulation is a lot easier if the manipulator knows everything about you.

The actual risk is data brokers, who aggregate this data and can use it for anything.

Using it to sell you shampoo isn’t terrible (it can be super annoying though). The problem is using that data to eg figure out who might be in the market for pregnancy related products. Or, ominously, who have stopped buying pregnancy related products early.

Or correlating interest in something they browse with voting intentions. Or interest in political action. There’s a lot of dodgy things you can do with that data. And little of this is being shared with *informed consent*.

Ads are NOT the problem. I love browsing through ads in magazines I buy. If online ads worked like outdoor ads or magazine ads, I suspect a lot less people would have a problem.

Because i don't want some private entity using my habits and preferences (which I didn't ask them to collect, btw, and, no, throwing a five page manifesto typed in 8-pt don't and making me agree to it or else doesn't count) against me and manipulating how I think

it's more than the ads. imagine if hacker news used ML to determine what articles you see on the front page based on whatever ad campaigns they think will result in a click from you. that would suck, right?

that's what these platforms do though, and that's not okay

Modern political manipulation techniques rely on the same data as ad targeting.

Ad targeting infrastructure is expensive and hard to hide, so banning it would defeat many political manipulation attacks.

Why should X be allowed to track me against my will?

You assume people stealing your private details for using it against you, are going to use it unaltered and in context. With enough bad faith and some manipulation, or just a bit of a twist, anything can be weaponized against you.

If private data is stored, there's already a chance of it getting out. You may get lucky, you may not, but for someone that hates you enough, any random detail can be a weapon. Even stuff that doesn't depend on your actions, like religion, country of origin or even medical details. People you associate with, even at a superficial level, can make you guilty by association. And let's not get into stuff like porn habits...

Political manipulation can be made real easy if they got dirt on you, too.

Maybe not illegal but optional (opt in not opt out). More issues are of course at hand but strong privacy should be a step in the right direction regardless. Let's not forsake traffic violations just because there are killers on the loose.

Wait until you read about Cambridge Analytica.

The moral threat is that your private data is processed and transformed into influence. And it's been the case over an over again that that influence is wielded without accountability or care for those being targeted. The methods of applying that influence are sometimes sophisticated, sometimes crude but almost always effective. The only protections against this an individual has is privacy. Yes there are other forms of influence, but targeted campaigns feed from data that _should_ be private is vastly more toxic.

> like political manipulation

Take 5 minutes to imagine how political troll campaigns are targeting their audience...

How does political manipulation look in a world where the platforms can't tell two users apart? Without the ability to tell a different story to each user, you're left trying to sway the masses all together. That's not manipulation, that's democracy.

Cool! I trust you won't object if I put a webcam in your bedroom, then?

> Why should it be illegal? I don’t understand the moral threat

Okay, then it should be legal for me to use Facebooks/Google's 'Intellectual Property' however I want.

Why should it be legal for them to steal my data, but illegal for me to use their's?