As is the case with all trends, most people have jumped onto the degoogling and privacy trend. Yes privacy is important, but think of it this way.
You, are just a commoner. You don’t have nearly enough data that needs to be SO privatised that you need to completely degoogle yourself. Yes, payment info is important and so is the violation of your rights but really? Skimming through metadata and running an ai on your images compromise your privacy?
You have to understand, snooping and tracking is fundamentally against your rights. So no corporate will do it directly. Google photos is a huge privacy concern apparently, but then you need to understand, GOOGLE doesn’t know what you have in your photos! They are all encrypted! It’s an AI that does the tagging and sorting who knows your photos and there’s no way to understand what data is present at a given neural node.
Trends are infact, in sone form, created by the corporates themselves. A little fine tuning here and there and suddenly a wave of a specific trend gets recommended to everyone! The sheer growth in the stock broking business should show u how some corporates even manage to ride these trends successfully!
Jumping onto a trend is stupid but it’s inevitable to get swept into one. Same goes for the privacy concerns. Your data gets leaked due to a security breach and not because someone was collecting your data, no! It’s just useful for an ai as the dataset for them to work on nowadays! There are a lot of privacy focused services booming and yes, they’re important, they’re good. But then, if there are no trackers, would your recommendation system work? No other photo viewer has been able to replicate the impeccable face tagging and metadata tagging features of Google photos. It’s because they can fine tune their services to suit your needs and make it completely personalised to you that they track or gain analytics from you! And it’s not bad! I mean. The tagging on photos is GENIUS. Nothing matched that and it’s suuuper useful. What would happen if Amazon started recommending me stoves and ovens or utensils while I need my best deals on GPUs right now? What will happen if YouTube wasn’t curated for my tastes? What would happen if Netflix wouldn’t show me the movies I like?
Tracking and metadata gathering is a little tradeoff for seemingly useless info for a HOST of useful features, making a whole digital world that’s centered around YOU. If privacy concerns you, be careful on what you let out! Simple! That’s never gonna change regardless of how much of privacy you use!
Tracking has a host of other benefits too! Say, a very vague scenario but still, instagram became anonymous. No one knows where is who, it’s just all private. Now someone posts a tape of you and your wife online. HOW will you track the person down? No one knows who it is. You see the benefits of getting tracked? And hell, tracking happens everywhere! When you come to school, your teacher calls out for you and you respond, she knows you are at school and only then are you marked present. You give up your location data to be marked present. Right? Same thing! Privacy is cool but you gotta give some thing in order to keep YOURSELF safe! Ghosting isn’t safe! Being public is! So the next time someone asks you to degoogle your phone but you LIKE using your very customised ecosystem, DONT switch. Stay. It’s fine to give up a little privacy to get a HOST of luxuries.
ZenXT 