Quote:
Originally Posted by igotrhythm
I'm gonna play devil's advocate here.
A certain amount of monitoring is essential for internet service providers to cover their asses. If they see someone is using their services to perform illegal activities (torrenting copyrighted material being the most obvious example), then they are on the front lines to stop it and deny future service to the customer, as well as hand over records of the illegal activity to the authorities as evidence. They provide an important service to their customers, and as such the ISP companies have a responsibility to ensure that their customers use their services in accordance with their end user license agreements. (Even though no end-user actually takes the time to read them since it's in so much legalese.)
So let's take this tack: Any amount of monitoring is a bad thing. If so, then we can't have our browser remember our password--that's a security risk! We can't have Google suggesting things for us as that uses tracking cookies. We can't have Facebook suggesting people to add to our friends list and pages to follow because it sees what we're interested in and comes up with others along similar lines. We can't even have FFR remember what our favorite settings are--again, cookies.
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There's a big difference here, though, and it doesn't boil down to a spectrum-style argument of "how much?"
It's much, much, much, much harder to offer a legitimate explanation as to why you were downloading illegal shit vs. giving an explanation for why you decided to Google "how does chloroform work" one day. The former is a very clear-cut illegal activity, whereas the latter is just a data point that isn't illegal in itself, but can be abused.
The problem is data mining. With enough data you can pretty much find
any relationship that you want. For example, if I look at enough sets of data (in general -- just any arbitrary sets of data from anything you can think of), I can find something that has accurately predicted every single Presidential election, to date. Of course, that sort of thing will come up
by chance alone with sufficient data, and the relationship won't actually exist when you look at the probabilities on-margin going forward.
In other words, if I were to know every single bit of information about your life, I can find and string together whatever bits and pieces I want in order to support the narrative I wish to push forward, no matter how circumstantial the evidence may be.
And so by allowing third parties to milk your data, you're granting them the power to fuck with you if they see fit.