The price of connection: 'surveillance capitalism'
&quot;It’s puzzling we are not already more angry about this transformation&quot;<p>I don&#x27;t think it is. We are the 1% who understand tech enough to make a rational choice of which services to use or avoid, use a VPN, ublock etc to lessen our exposure to personally acceptable levels. We&#x27;re aware that some tracking goes on fingerprinting. The article seems to be written by the 1% for the 1%. The people who read these sorts of articles and have read enough to know the basics of tracking, retargeting, bubbling, IoT, surveillance, Snowden etc.<p>For the rest, and I include nearly all &quot;tech natives&quot; like our kid&#x27;s generation, and plenty who should know better, if an app get&#x27;s mentioned it&#x27;s installed and the permissions OK&#x27;d, then they run it, <i>now</i> they wonder what it is and if it&#x27;s any good. If you try and increase awareness they&#x27;re about as interested as they were in maths lessons (or whatever your most hated thing was). When Snowden was fresh and being discussed it was &quot;but terrorists&quot;, &quot;but safety&quot; and &quot;I don&#x27;t care if NSA read my pizza orders and stupid texts&quot;. Completely missing the point then.<p>Their idea of a complex password is usually laughable going on friends and family tech support. No amount of hinting gets it acceptable, or willing to use a manager.<p>IoT is cute light bulbs, smart baby monitors and neat gadgets. No realisation that the security of most is shit, that a surprising amount of cams are online, or what it means to put something on the network.<p>The transformation isn&#x27;t realised. The implications aren&#x27;t either. Most people&#x27;s <i>only</i> awareness of bubble effects is wondering why they&#x27;ve seen no FB posts from their sister in ages (Edgerank decided they weren&#x27;t worthy). There&#x27;s <i>no</i> awareness of it in search, or news, or youtube and assume, no matter how skewed their results are, that what they see is the &quot;truth&quot;. If there&#x27;s a bubble effect for extremist and conspiracy theorists too, we should maybe be concerned.<p>I gave up even trying to educate on this stuff.<p>&quot;What’s needed is more collective reflection on the costs of capitalism’s new data relations for our very possibilities of ethical life.&quot;<p>Apart from asking isn&#x27;t it too late already? How can we have a collective reflection when effectively no one is aware of the issues or problems?