Thread: Spyware ? !
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Old January 18th 18, 03:05 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Mayayana
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Posts: 6,438
Default Spyware ? !

wrote

| In any case, one of the things (among many) that is totally and
| completely UNacceptable is the apparent telemetry and spyware.
|
| How could anyone accept this ? !

It's been compared to the well known analogy
of boiling a frog. The process has been slow
and gradual. Microsoft started with ads on the
desktop in 1998. 20 years ago. (Remember the
"channel bar"? It was a desktop billboard with ads
from Disney and others.) MS have been patiently
trying to move in that direction whenever possible.
(So Bill Gates really is as much of a genius as
he thinks he is. He had a plan to exploit his
customers decades before it became fashionable.)

In '99 there was outrage when MS were caught
reading registration info from the Registry at the
Windows Update site. (With ActiveX they could
do anything.) MS promised to stop spying. That
seems so innocent now. They weren't trying to
double dip by selling their customers to advertisers.
They were only trying to get a list of customers.
And rightly they were told that the computers
and data of their customers were none of their
business.

Facebook started out as a site for chatting
with friends. Now they own their customers'
social lives and those customers are forced to
live with intrusion and ads, just to talk to their
friends. How do they accept that?

When Facebook really started to get sleazy
there was a lot of discussion. The conclusion
I heard from people repeatedly was that they
couldn't leave Facebook because they'd never
hear about parties otherwise!

Nearly 1/3 of millennials in one recent survey,
male and female, think that telling a young woman
she looks good is harassment. But they don't
complain about Facebook deciding which friends'
comments they'll get to read or how many ads
they'll have to go through to get there. Their
own private lives are now something like a retail
store. And they gave it all away willingly, for
a little titillation and a lot of convenience.

It's like one of those sci-fi movies where
everyone is drugged into passivity. But in
this case it's not so much passivity as it is
that people ar willingly becoming "consumeroids",
with no other purpose in life but to consume
momentary distraction.

(I was struck by that reading about the
woman who wrote about her date with Aziz
Ansari. She was complaining anonymously to
the world that she spent her time doing
something and was not fully gratified. In the
process she blackballed another person, but
she's clearly too childish to even understand
that.)

Yesterday I was reading about an older man
who leased a car and thought it was odd that
the contract forced him to agree to being
spied on wherever he went. He decided that
while it was odd, he didn't really care. He
figures his life is boring. The ethical angle
never crossed his mind. The logic was simply:

I want this car. I don't rob banks. So their
rules shouldn't hurt me. So I'll get this car.

The conspicuously missing element in all
these stories is social fabric, sense of
social responsibility, and sense of membership
in society.

But I guess it could be worse. You could
be a starry-eyed member of the Apple
Church, standing in line to have your wallet
vacuumed out in exchange for a device that
won't be supported in 3 years, and all the
while cheering Apple's integrity because
Timmy Cook is going to report Apple's true
income now that he can get a good deal on
the taxes. It's front page at the NYT today:
Thanks to the Republicans, Apple is now
free to improve America and create jobs.

With facts like that who needs fake news?


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