it's worth remembering that somewhere, someone or a team:
- had a whiteboard/design/brainstorming session
- decided or was told to develop a feature involving data hoovering, with whatever justification
- not enough of the team said "no", or were replaced by those that said "yes", that the feature made it to production
- decided to sell/buy/run analyses over said data to increase profits (ostensibly)
now, if there were a handful of companies doing this consistently, that'd be one thing. however, if all these apps, web sites, etc. are engaging in this, then it's clear there's just zero fundamental ethical force to stop data hoovering, and we ought to expect that the data collection will increase up to and until government regulation of this stuff.
anyway, from where i sit, the engineers, vendors and data scientists involved in surveillance capitalism must share some of the blame, if not a lion's share.
- had a whiteboard/design/brainstorming session
- decided or was told to develop a feature involving data hoovering, with whatever justification
- not enough of the team said "no", or were replaced by those that said "yes", that the feature made it to production
- decided to sell/buy/run analyses over said data to increase profits (ostensibly)
now, if there were a handful of companies doing this consistently, that'd be one thing. however, if all these apps, web sites, etc. are engaging in this, then it's clear there's just zero fundamental ethical force to stop data hoovering, and we ought to expect that the data collection will increase up to and until government regulation of this stuff.
anyway, from where i sit, the engineers, vendors and data scientists involved in surveillance capitalism must share some of the blame, if not a lion's share.