> What is lacking is a solid plan of what to do instead.
One of the issues is that surveillance capitalism is a collective action problem. If companies have more data about people like you then they can capture more of the consumer surplus when they sell you things. But they don't need data about you specifically for that, only aggregate data about people like you. So if you don't sell your privacy but someone else does, you don't get the free services but you still pay the higher prices. So everybody sells out.
Europe tried to address this with the GDPR, but the amount of friction that creates is problematic. What might work better is that instead of regulating collection, regulate third party distribution. Put Equifax out of business because they can't have a giant data breach if no one can give them any data. And if there are no more credit scores and it's harder for people to get a loan, housing prices would come down to what people could afford without having to pay interest on half a million dollars to the bank for thirty years. Probably a good thing.
Combine that with a big honking tax on advertising revenue to reduce the profits from collecting the data for that purpose and you reduce the incentive to collect data on everyone, without affecting smaller companies that don't sell advertising or user data to anyone.
But that would be a huge political feat. You'd be going after multiple hundred billion plus dollar companies in addition to the banks.
The other alternative would be for enough individuals to recognize the collective action problem and selflessly help their neighbors by not patronizing these companies, but that's not a trivial feat either.
I don’t disagree. I am talking even smaller scale though. A lot of people would risk being deemed a poor performer and getting fired if they did things correctly. Because what they would be delivering wouldn’t be valued. There needs to be a path where you can join an organization, take a course, go to a conference, get a certificate or whatever so people can differentiate. I essentially think those influential in this area are overestimating “will” over “way” in “if there’s a will, there’s a way”. Today, with information proliferation, if there’s a way people will come to you. Maybe it could be as simple as a six hour work day. That isn’t somehthing most companies would do without thinking about it.
There are individual-level consequences, but it's a macro-level problem. Doing the right thing costs less in the short term but more in the long term. But then someone quotes the Keynesian dodge ("in the long run we are all dead") as if humans will be extinct before we have to pay the piper, as if we're talking about billion year timescales rather than a few years or months.
And maybe we're back to the information asymmetry. People don't connect the fact that using Facebook's VPN could make them have to pay more for groceries than the cost of just paying for a different VPN, so they use it, and it costs them more than they expect it to, and after being multiplied by a thousand things like that, they don't understand why they have so much more debt than their parents did. The fact that the two are related hasn't really entered the public consciousness.
But it's not at the level of company-to-software-developer, it's at the level of customer-to-company. Companies can already tell what kind of developers they're employing. Companies know when they're selling out. But customers generally don't know that about companies.
It's like the whole religious war between Apple and Google. Is Android or iOS the best phone for user privacy? Trick question. It's PureOS. But most people aren't even aware of the possibility of that.
One of the issues is that surveillance capitalism is a collective action problem. If companies have more data about people like you then they can capture more of the consumer surplus when they sell you things. But they don't need data about you specifically for that, only aggregate data about people like you. So if you don't sell your privacy but someone else does, you don't get the free services but you still pay the higher prices. So everybody sells out.
Europe tried to address this with the GDPR, but the amount of friction that creates is problematic. What might work better is that instead of regulating collection, regulate third party distribution. Put Equifax out of business because they can't have a giant data breach if no one can give them any data. And if there are no more credit scores and it's harder for people to get a loan, housing prices would come down to what people could afford without having to pay interest on half a million dollars to the bank for thirty years. Probably a good thing.
Combine that with a big honking tax on advertising revenue to reduce the profits from collecting the data for that purpose and you reduce the incentive to collect data on everyone, without affecting smaller companies that don't sell advertising or user data to anyone.
But that would be a huge political feat. You'd be going after multiple hundred billion plus dollar companies in addition to the banks.
The other alternative would be for enough individuals to recognize the collective action problem and selflessly help their neighbors by not patronizing these companies, but that's not a trivial feat either.