Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany
This is an important discussion, but nobody seems to be asking the question - what is the end goal here for either side?<p>Lets take the extremes as a beginning..<p>1. Lets assume every action a person takes is logged. That means every keystroke, cough, heartbeat, meal, path taken etc... for everyone on the planet is tracked somewhere in some system.<p>2. On the flip side lets say that nothing is logged and we stop using systems that track our behavior altogether.<p>- What are the costs and benefits to either extreme and where would the people of the future prefer to lie on that extreme? Is there a realistic middle ground?<p>If the question is about informed consent then I am afraid it's a losing battle. Consumers do not understand even the basic externalities of different behaviors - and even if you printed them on the label it would mostly be noise. So to expect that people will understand all possible negative externalities with sharing data is a bridge too far.<p>I personally think that more accurate lifestyle data, provided by users to Machine systems, with the purpose of affecting behaviors, based on stated and revealed preferences of the users would be the best long term outcome. Offloading decision making to a machine is the best decision we will ever make as a species - and that requires a lot of training data and other data to optimize.<p>Otherwise we might as well just go back to everyone being a farmer.