Today, you can choose not to drive a Tesla if you don’t want Elon Musk, Inc. knowing everywhere you go.
Tomorrow, you might have to limit where you live because you won’t live in a Google Home and reconsider having 20/20 vision again in exchange for the artificial lens company seeing everything you see.
Privacy is not something you can “vote with your wallet” on. We either protect it as a human right or we lose it altogether.
@aral Agreed, and yet few had reservations when companies like Google implemented school “solutions” which begin tracking activity from children as early as kindergarten. Trying to opt out is virtually impossible, and school boards typically do not understand or evaluate beyond face-value because of the perception of “free” services. We are certainly already there, but is the scope of this issue already past the point of creating severe consequences that are beyond reproach?
@indyr Indeed. And I was among those few. I resigned from the board of Code Club when they brought Google on. As did one of the co-founders. The other? They’re now an OBE. Which tells you everything you need to know, really.
@aral I commend you both for making the ethical choice, despite normalization of abandoning ethics for $$ in the industry. This does speak volumes. Especially considering there hasn’t been a significant shift in public behaviour in the wake of companies like Theranos. FOMO is the Stockholm Syndrome of tech, and with the economy dipping, the public needs to abandon the mentality that their personal data doesn’t have value. Hopefully posts like yours will be a wake up call.