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this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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Asklemmy
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The more they claim they know about you the more they can charge for ads. I have recently realized that Google, Facebook and such are not only powerful because they aggregate data, but rather because they can sell their product (=your attention) to other companies very, very well. People often claim companies would not pay for advertisements had they didn't work โ I claim otherwise; they pay for advertisements because Google falsely claims how effective they are and that's why they need to collect your data and be able to show that to their customers to boost their (Google's) sales. In other words they don't do that to sell the customers product well (the one that has been advertised) but rather sell their own product, which is ad space.
I've heard this a few times. It's certainly compelling to me, I guess it's obviously a hard thing to know given it will be heavily debated by those companies and it's always going to be obscured by them to maintain a mystique, whether it works or doesn't since in both cases it helps to keep everyone a little bit in the dark.
Part of this idea that the surveillance economy is not nearly as effective at controlling consumer behavior as claimed makes me wonder if I'm being unnecessarily paranoid when I jealously guard my privacy since it seems it could be that my data is taken potentially in service of nothing. Nevertheless I instinctively just don't want to take the risk that hooverig up all that data really does work for manipulation and control.
I don't think it's paranoid. Best case scenario, they really are using your data ineffectively, which imo is still bad because you are not getting any benefit from it. But worst case scenario is a government coming into power that abuses this data to extents we can't possible fathom today.
Exactly this.
Proving who has bigger balls