Data is the new Oil: Why YOU Are The Product (debate)

Interesting angle presented by Jaron Lanier below ... Need to retrieve his book "You are not a Gadget" from my Kindle archive again. I don't really buy the point of data-mining and its use in social commerce being questionable, btw - it all comes down to the 'people formerly known a consumers having CONTROL and trusting companies like Spotify and Facebook with their data.

The Quietus | Opinion | Black Sky Thinking | Social Media, Spotify & Why YOU Are The Product

"A recent Twitter post from the account of brand strategist and "media futurist" Gerd Leonhard also evoked the mythical German scholar who made a deal with the devil - with a hash tag no less: #faust. Leonhard was linking to an article about the way ad companies collect data about us through cookies picked up on the sites we visit. "We get free content" wrote Leonhard, "in return we allow data collection." Considering the famously opaque privacy policies routinely published by companies such as Google and Facebook, we might argue that these dotcoms, like Ulmer's Major Krenner, expect a transparency from their users that they would never submit to themselves. When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person,” he said, “they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program.” And later, “I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.”

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