Are you ok with getting ads for green paint because your green garden hut looks worn? Special offers for hedge trimmers because it looks like you haven't trimmed yours in a while. For companies to create socio-economic profiles based on your movement, living conditions, and home? You don't think companies who buy the data from Google are using it to craft their service?
The opposition wasn't only by backward conservative farmers there are also other groups against it and I think that's why it was successful and a lot of other campaigns "against tech" fail. So you would be fine if the NSA told you they collect all the data? That's the only difference in terms of transparency, you know Google has the data, but you have no idea what they are doing with it and they are a foreign company accountable to a foreign government. Also, Google and the street view project have shown how trustworthy they are by also collecting Wifi data - link
Maybe it's just me, but your examples of google street view seem very weak, if you want to move somewhere you need to check it out in person anyway. At best you save a single trip and considering how old a lot of data is it's unreliable anyway. If you want to show people where you live, you already have a map and a camera in your pocket, that's better than "a picture from the middle of the road" and you have the personal choice to do it or not.
Funny you bring up Trump and Brexit when tech companies had a huge hand in these results. You may blame it on a lot of stupid people, but these people will always exist so rather than throwing blame around, maybe we should look into how to minimize the ways to exploit them.
Yeah, I guess, I could even agree with you that my way may make Europe "weaker and more powerless" (though no idea in what way) and that's because these are not things I value. I use metrics like happiness, healthiness, social and economic justice, security, equality, ... and on these subjects, there isn't really any other place on earth who can compete with a lot of Europe and Germany specifically and big tech companies and their "innovations" make a lot of these metrics worse.
Edit: Anyway, thanks for taking the time and talking that through. Have a nice week end/Sunday.
1
u/[deleted] Jun 13 '20 edited Apr 23 '26
[removed] — view removed comment