bmwman91 :
Just remember folks, YOU are the product. Pretty soon, all content will be ad content and we'll all have marketing tripe jammed into our eyeballs 24/7. Just wait until someone invents a dream control unit. Wake up every day with a compulsion to buy a new blender and life insurance. Glorious!
Estix :
So, wait, a year ago, MS was making a huge deal about the "Do Not Track" feature of IE 10,.. Now they're talking about taking full control over tracking from the user?
Was all the Do Not Track business just to make advertises have to use their system?
Meh, the company that is taking over the world is Google, and the general public can't wait to rush into Big Brother Google's loving arms. What is Google's mantra? "We won't charge you up-front, but we'll sell every bit of information that you put into our services for marketing." Is it such a surprise that MS is changing their tune in light of Google's dominance with this strategy?
You know, in the early 80's, we saw a slow but steady trend starting, and that trend was cheap-foreign labour for cheap goods in the store. Companies would shut down a first world factory supporting the lifestyle of first world workers, and get virtual slave labour making their goods in Taiwan - which were immediately imported back to the first world to be sold for low prices and huge profits. But what people didn't consider was the long term effects of this whole racket... At the time, people thought it was wonderful - you save a few bucks in the store, and where is the harm in that? Sure, someone, somewhere, lost a job that paid a decent wage, and the money may filter right to the top, but it's not that big a deal - right?
Fast forward 30 years later and everyone is screaming "WHERE HAVE ALL THE JOBS GONE? THE CORPORATIONS ARE AT FAULT!"... No, they aren't. The fault lies with hundreds of millions of short sighted people who went into a store and bought Made in Taiwan (and later China) goods over made in America/Canada/England/Spain/Italy/wherever. The demand was there for cheap goods, so those goods were made. Every bit as much as it is stupid to blame drug use on Mexican drug lords, it's inane to blame "Made in China" on American companies and Chinese factories - because neither would exist without massive demand for the product.
Today, in computers, we pay a flat rate for products.. Or at least we did a few years ago. There are all sorts of ups and downs to this model, but the basics of it is "I hand $50 over to company X and I get product Y which cost them Z - Q% to make." But this is changing, and Google has to be the flagship of this change, and their success it dragging everyone along. Why compete with a successful model? People can't wait to get products for fewer dollars if all it takes is wholesaling our personal information in order to get our gadgets, devices, and doo-dads. Because that's the future... You get the delivery device/service cheap or free, but everything you do with it will be micro-transactioned to the gills and the companies will milk more money from you with a "free" device than they ever did getting you to pay up front.
I'll likely still be kicking around in 30 years, but at that time, I suspect I'll see hordes of people in another revolt, blaming the evil corporations for what they perceive as a wrongdoing - which was, in reality, those corporations giving them *exactly* what they wanted. That perceived wrong doing, I suspect, will be the death of private information, because 95%+ of the companies is the first world will have ditched the "pay upfront for a product" model in favour of the more profitable "offer cheap or free, but sell the 'buyer' out to merchants once they are feeding data into our devices" model.
Guess what, one of the biggest companies that had the idea of "Hey, we can get our money from the customer without selling all of their private information" is changing their business model to sell your information to the highest bidder. That's what the whole Scroogled ad campaigns were about, as we were all laughing at them, and silly old outdated Microsoft, charging such a stupid amount for their OS's and software suites, as Google offers their services for free - because they are really free, right?.... Right?
This is the beginning of - heck, not the beginning, this is phase ten - of the next big injustice that billions of people will be bitching about 30, 20, or 10 years down the road, which people are inviting into their homes right now. It has happened before, it will happen again - it is happening now. What people think about big bad old Microsoft now, for being the evil of a dying business model, people will think about Google once they realize the implications of what Google is doing. But not yet... For now, we all love them, because they put cool stuff in our hands for cheap, and who really cares what's going on under the hood - right?
I'd say something like "make a stand now" or "vote with your wallets - support privacy, pay for your products up front rather than with your private information!" now, but, it would be an inane waste of time. This is happening. Heck, it has happened. Back in the 80's, you could have held a "Buy American!" protest in every major city in the US every week of the year, and half the people attending it or agreeing with the message would have still made the important decision to buy cheap foreign goods when they saw the price tags staring them in the face. I'll get a few snide remarks proclaiming me a fanboy or saying that I'm missing how fast the next device X is going to be for so cheap or whatever, and maybe a few will agree. None of it will matter. People will vote for the cheap with their wallets, without meaningful exception.
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