This is carpe diem time for data governance. “We’re at a tipping point.”
Except, it's too late guys. The tipping point happened when we continued to use free services like YouTube and accepting the fact that our video were being preceded by advertising. When we started accepting the fact that we have to click "its ok" to accept cookies when we visit a website. When we started accepting alerts on our phones for special deals. When we started installing software on our computers, and rather than options for features, we accepted tailored advertising. We we started becoming lazy pigs, and taking the "smart" from ourselves and implanting it into our homes.
You weren't kidding- that is one loong article. But, what a read! Thanks for sharing it. Wish I could say it was an eye-opener, but it's not. We should have all seen this coming, long ago. We have essentially sold ourselves to the whim of Big Data and their employers, Big Advertisers.
I used to have a Faceplant account, which I had logged into every few months just for appearances sake. After the Cambridge Anal Extraction scandal, that was the last straw for me.
This is why, it's my belief, it is more important than ever to secure your own domain name and learn how to use it. Whether an end user or investor.
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I took the liberty of extracting some points from the article, along with some of my own thoughts:
Balsillie warned, was developing faster than the ability of policy makers to reckon with its consequences. “We are cascading toward a surveillance state,” he said, conjuring a world divided into the watchers and the watched, a world where Big Tech piles up astronomical profits by distilling our everyday experiences into data to monetize—in some instances, doing so “without a moral conscience.”
Where Balsillie's agenda from the start was to protect our personal data, it's no wonder he had a fight, and lost, against the behemoths like Big G.
it would seem reckless not to be concerned that such power is accountable to shareholders rather than elected officials.
Reckless? Ya think?? Shareholders rule, all others drool. What has perplexed me for years, are we all, as shareholders, living with our head stuck in the sand? Does profit trump freedom? In many ways, money is a shackle.
Balsillie’s worry, however, is ultimately less about privacy than about control. “History,” he said to the MPs, “offers sobering lessons about societies that practise mass surveillance.”
His bible in business was the ancient Chinese text The Art of War by Sun Tzu...
Balsillie now wields this same predatory expertise in his war to rein in the tech industry and awaken Canadians to the dangers of concentrating too much power in the hands of a few companies that have become rich by knowing more about us than we do about ourselves.
Sidewalk Labs is "an Orwellian nightmare in the making".
Customized advertising preferences. Sidewalk Labs. What a joy it will be to live there, once completed. Just think, we may not even have to get out of bed to go to work, and will have our food and products chosen for us, drone delivered.
Sensors as tiny as a grain of salt have been developed to track our movements.
Facial-recognition technology has been employed in some Canadian malls to monitor the age and gender of shoppers.
camera-embedded bathroom mirrors
Wake up Canada. This is all smoke and mirrors. A distraction to this very critical statement from the article:
Over the last twenty years, the global economy has become less dependent on physical assets, such as factories and merchandise, and more dependent on intangible assets, such as patents, databases, copyrights, software, and algorithms
Doh. Take a look at our homes. At our cities. While we are busy worrying about Alexa playing our favorite songs, our foundations are crumbling. Can Alexa fix that??