Maggie's Farm

Regarding Big Tech...

This is what I did for a living - protecting privacy and data. I can tell you the worst companies to negotiate with were (in order of despicableness...as they were unwilling to go along with ANY guidelines but their own):

1. Politicians running for office (demand ownership of data and access to it - oddly, Trump did not... as much as he managed digital and new media well, I was always stunned that his team didn't demand it)
2. The government (administrative and bureaucratic ogranizations like the military)
3. Amazon
4. Google
5. Facebook
6. Oracle

There are more. But I actually twisted Amazon's arm enough once to get them to agree to our terms 6 years ago - a fact they never forgot and demanded, 2 years later, to have that agreement ignored and keep me off the negotiations.

My point is that government regulation of big tech will MAKE THINGS WORSE and ALREADY HAS. Part of the EU's effort means that fines are so bad that only the largest firms can afford them. This has hurt innovation dramatically, in the EU. Many small firms have left and only increased the power of big tech as a result.

California has what is called CCPA - California Consumer Privacy Act. This is, perhaps, the biggest bunch of moronic nonsense I've ever seen and does relatively little to improve things - but it does help politicians dramatically by providing CYA appeal and it allows big companies to keep collecting information as long as there are "opt-out" provisions (which nobody ever uses).

Again, the entire issue will revolve around a whole lot of make-work provisions being created - costs incurred, lots of $$$ for lawyers and politicians and "innovation" in areas that are not productive or useful.

There are better ways to improve things. But government is probably the LEAST likely way to do it. Basically the government wants what the big tech guys have - and they will work together to keep each other happy while pretending to be at each others' throats....

BTW...one thing worth adding.

I fought long and hard to prevent ad targeting for pharmaceutical companies.
I can't go into details here, but there are companies that have access to tons of information about your health. Most of it is 'protected' by "law". Thing is, even if it's anonymized, you only need 3 additional points of data to deanonymize it.

So lots of companies exist to do the targeting in an 'anoymous' fashion. No, they don't know who you are. But if they want to find out it's not hard at all.

The additional irony here is that companies like Google go out of their way to reduce the 'potential damage' by prohibiting targeting specific health issues that are 'sensitive'. AIDS, diabetes, other chronic issues. That'a good thing, until you stop and realize there are many other non-sensitive issues that correlate to sensitive ones, so you can craft a campaign to target non-sensitive health issues and, over time, identify who has the sensitive ones.

I'd worked hard to stop that. There's no reason for this kind of thing, it actually works counter to a good ad campaign - and adds very high costs to the advertising itself. But many in marketing are convinced of their own superior intellect about this stuff and think it's a way to reduce costs and do precision targeted campaigns. It's not...but the details of why are long and complicated so I won't get into that.

Point is, there's TONS of data out there and knowing what's at risk is what government DOES NOT want you to know. It is NOT protecting you.

For what it's worth digital does not make things 'different'. All this was out there before, it just wasn't as easily compiled. There is nothing new to what's going on...it's just easier to do now.