
Tech's most egregious violations of user privacy - octosphere
https://www.axios.com/tech-user-practices-subscription-privacy-moviepass-12223fd0-b5f8-4e47-9fdb-03ead988516f.html
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hkai
Today was the news that Alibaba wants to share users social credit score with
immigration authorities in foreign countries to prevent unreliable people from
going abroad.

Is this bad enough or can we do worse?

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kbos87
The last item in this list is really disappointing and gives the rest of the
article a lot less credibility, which is too bad. Most of these are good
examples of things that users should be outraged about - they are deliberate
decisions made by companies or their employees to further their own interests
on the backs of and at the expense of their users without their consent. While
I’m no Amazon fan, I’m pretty convinced that the last example of an Alexa
malfunction really was an unintended bug. Conflating the two types of
situations makes it easy for people to write this off as biased.

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dasil003
Fair, however the fact that it's a totally unintended bug is what makes it all
the more terrifying. In fact I would assume the Alexa team has been freaking
out pretty hard about this because it has the potential to kill the entire
market before it matures.

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AndrewUnmuted
It’s too late for that. Alexa is bundled in new Sonos units, and anybody with
a Fire TV already has it.

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tzs
I don't understand the MoviePass one. It says it is difficult to cancel a
membership because accepting TOS updates, which the app requires you to do
when you open it, cancels the membership cancellation.

That's certainly bad, and is a strong sign of either maliciousness or an
incompetent testing department--but I don't see how it is a _privacy_
violation.

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wiz21c
I've been reading stuff like that for years. But is there, somewhere, a
thorough explanation of how these "stolen" data are actually used against us,
how they are valued, by whom, etc. ? (I didn't look in Google). Not some
ideological explanation ('cos we all understand that the data collection
induces weakens us against big-corp), but concrete, such as "this advertiser
has done this kind of (horror) stuff using that kind of google collected
data". I ask 'cos advertising doesn't look that dangerous to many people; it
doesn't have the blood of us customers on its hands.

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kartan
> "this advertiser has done this kind of (horror) stuff using that kind of
> google collected data"

Data collected by Facebook was used to radicalize USA population looking into
their political preferences and organizing groups in the extreme of the
spectrum.

Political ads were used to show lies like "Europe, is negotiating to open
borders with Turkey" to people depending on their political orientation during
the "Brexit" vote by also Russia.

Targetted ads by hostile countries without any electoral supervision are
running amok in social networks as ads are private and personalized.

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throw2016
'Improving user experience' is a dead giveaway of shady untenable behavior.

They want your data, but they don't want to be transparent about it. Why do
highly paid highly educated people get a free pass to behave unethically? If
you think users are 'idiots' why go to such lengths to deceive them.

You can just imagine the tyrant calmly responding to accusations of tyranny
that it's to 'improve the citizens experience'.

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wereHamster
Just last week I spent a day implementing a small new feature (I'm a web
developer). Now that the feature has been published, I'd love to track how
many users actually use it. To see if it was worth spending the time, whether
we should make that feature available in more places etc. But I can't because
we're forbidden to collect any sorts of data.

If I was allowed to collect data, as what should I frame it, if not "improving
user experience"?

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ABCLAW
"User experiences" can also be "improved" by selling the usage data to
advertisers for tracking.

How's about "Our site collects usage data to inform us about how our site is
used. We use only this data to inform our feature development priorities and
we do not share your data with anyone else. Thanks for coming to visit"

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yuhong
This reminds me that I like to mention that doing targeted ads that is
actually good require a system specifically designed to do so.

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dawnerd
The moviepass one is a bit silly. Not to defend them, but if you’re gonna
cancel a service you know is pretty shady, don’t go and click accept. All
those people should have deleted the app right away. It’s kind of like
deleting a Facebook account then logging back in.

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defap
>It’s kind of like deleting a Facebook account then logging back in.

It’s not like that, though. You pay for MoviePass up front each month.
Cancelling means you don’t want to pay for next month, but you are still able
to use it for this month. Deleting the app would just be throwing money away.

They’re exploiting users who want to get fair value from their existing
purchase.

