I just posted a comment on Greg's site. It is in the approval mode, so I'll share it here.
His post isn't about privacy. It is about arguing that people will give up privacy to get advertising supported, free content. Anyone who thinks this has their head in the sand.
Here is what I said: What if concerns about privacy have subsided because we have changed the way we use social media and other media that is free/advertising supported. For example, sharing only the most innocuous information. Or spending less time with it. The partyline analogy is more relevant. No one chose a partyline because they had a choice of a private line over a partyline, they paid a premium for a private line the minute it was available. Remember CB radios? When mobile phones became available, the CB radio market plummeted. The only people who have to believe people prefer advertising to paying for content are people in the business of selling advertising. What do the folks who pay for HBO, Showtime, ITunes, Netflix, Pandora, etc. think? I suspect the people who started these businesses were told no one will ever pay for it.
On Dec 16, 2014, at 8:35 AM, Iain Henderson <
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> wrote: Well said John. The purpose of this list, as I recall it, is to discuss and foster the development of VRM or related projects; not to debate whether VRM or the mind set that wishes to build on the side of the individual is a good idea. Perhaps we need a separate list for that debate (I for one won’t be joining).CheersIainOn 16 Dec 2014, at 12:56, Wunderlich, John <
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Graham;
<Rant alert>
Companies do things all the time. Depending on the country, we're talking about, they use child labour, shoot union militants, or expose workers to poisonous chemicals. All of these practices are in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In many cases, however, they are clearly lawful in the countries where they occur, not least because in many of those countries, the companies write the laws (see Elizabeth Warren's recent comments on Citibank and Dodd-Frank for a 1st world example). None of these examples 'drive a coach and horse' through the rights being violate. They just demonstrate that people and the companies they run are flawed.
This is not a fruitful discussion. I'm on the list because I think that there is a way to build system that respect user choice and that, in the long run, agency has to be shared with users. That's the essence of the privacy discussion in a commercial setting - individuals should have some element of choice and control over what is done with their information, and should have some element of choice and control over their browsers, computers and information environment. I'm not on this list to make apologies for companies that vioate user trust or privacy in the name of 'innovation' or 'progress'.
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