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I find the attitude on display here utterly gross and it makes me wonder where this person got it. Is this the common attitude inside Google or Silicon Valley proper these days?

Privacy used to be kind of sacrosanct in the industry. What happened?

I guess when surveillance driven advertising pays all the bills it has an extreme warping effect on everyone’s mentality. It’s hard to care about privacy when violating it is how you get paid.

I’m increasingly wondering if we might vastly improve our society by banning or taxing the hell out of all advertising. It’s an industry that makes the world a worse place in deep and pervasive ways that go much further than just making everything ugly and obnoxious. The industry pushes a toxic relationship between people and businesses at every level.



> Privacy used to be kind of sacrosanct in the industry. What happened?

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.


> I find the attitude on display here utterly gross and it makes me wonder where this person got it.

It is gross. It's also very ignorant. The author's argument basically boils down to, "I can't see an obvious major downside to this proposal, so that must mean there isn't one nor will there ever be one". How many times to we have to get burned by large companies invading our privacy and after promising not to before we wise up?




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