A certain amount of hustle and overselling by inventors and new companies has always been a thing. What’s unfamiliar in recent times is the combination of large, oligopoly companies with the failure of those companies to make an effort to go legit as they grow up. While American business culture has always celebrated “fake it ’til you make it,” we have pivoted to “make it, then fake it even harder.”
> A certain amount of hustle and overselling by inventors and new companies has always been a thing.
True, but there used to be a certain amount of restraint about it, in order to try to walk the fine line between "hyperbole" and "lying".
These days, companies don't care about that line and just lie freely, while at the same time straight-up abusing their customers. The lack of trust, and even the anger, is very well-earned.
It’s format based. The basis for explanations are folk science: stories. They aren’t any more accurate than when they began except they incorporate science. But that does not in itself make them scientific. Same with economics, which is not a science but it includes aspects of it. Now look at code, which is neither tethered to engineering or science, but exists wholly separate operating behavior, operating folk science and science yet in conflation winds up being folk science.
The news is folk science. Explanations (a dispute over money ends in murder) are substituted for correlations (not every dispute over money ends up violent). The news reinforces big techs reliance on exploitative explanation addiction rather than the widespread adoption of post folk science correlations.
Is each browser process dedicated to a single customer, or do you clear cookies and other state (localStorage, cache, Chrome advertising features...) between customers?
Google Chrome has another "AI training" API that has been there for a while -- document.browsingTopics() -- this is for passing information about your browsing history to ML on the Google side. Hard to be sure about what information about you can be inferred from this.
It might also be a good idea to block or warn about sites using that one.
You can have the most tricked-out, up-to-date protections on your client, or in a proxy between your client and a web site...and if that site is using server-to-server tracking they can get around it.
The tricky part, though, is that even with your client-side settings and privacy tools set up 100% right, any company that has your info can still send it to Facebook server-to-server, with "Conversions API."
WA MHMD is a game changer because private right of action. Doesn't rely on the attorney general or a dedicated privacy agency to take action -- private lawyers can.
(Technically not the first privacy law with private right of action because the Video Privacy Protection Act has one, but that law was originally passed to cover videotape rentals and the courts are still working out how it applies to video content on the Internet)
Yeah, that's one of the big ways that it's stronger than California's law (where the private right of action is limited to data breaches). [Another way is that it's opt-in, with an additional authorization for sale of data; California's law is opt-out.]
Of course MHMD doesn't take effect until after the next legislative session, so I'm sure there will be attempts to weaken it. So I'm not counting any chickens quite yet!
The companies it's mainly good for are those who have personal data but are not required to register as a data broker. So if you have a brand with content, forums, retail, events, or whatever and can collect info on people, then by pure supply and demand the market value of your audience data goes up.
