John Oliver on data brokers

[donheff]

This is a good John Oliver piece on Internet data brokers. The final minutes where he gathers data from Congress critters is hillarious.

[URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqn3gR1WTcA"/URL]

 

[CaptTom]

That was a good one. He can get preachy, and sometimes he over-sensationalizes and over-simplifies things. Life can be nuanced.

But with this subject, I don't think there's really "another side to the story." Somehow we've all bought into this surveillance economy. It's real, and it's bad.

Like many of these sorts of things, I don't blame the companies doing it. That's just market capitalism. But every market needs some rules. Much as I distrust government regulation, someone has to do it. It seems right now, nobody is. The EU has been trying to do something, but I'm not sure it's having the desired effect. We really need to figure out how to get this one right.

 

[Rianne]

Yikes!! That last 5 minutes was a holy crap moment. John Oliver has a way of doing that. I'm #1 guilty of clicking on "Allow cookies." What's the point of closing your drapes or blinds in the house?

 

[GTFan]

Use a privacy-first browser like Brave and cookies are (mostly) not an issue.

 

[CaptTom]

Most browsers allow you to delete cookies on exit. And there are add-ons (or built-in settings) which allow you to block tracker (third-party) cookies.

If you use the delete cookies on exit option, you can normally put in exceptions for sites you frequent (like this one.)

And of course, don't log on to anything until you actually need to. A good example is Amazon. I search for whatever I'm interested in, be it for me, for a friend, or just out of curiosity. But I don't get 1,000 ads for whatever stupid thing I searched for. It can't remember me because I'm not logged in, I block trackers and I clear cookies on exit. I'm like a random new user each time.

Another great experiment is to open YouTube without logging on, having cleared cookies and blocked trackers. The algorithm has no way to spoon-feed you content it thinks will "engage" you. So it feeds you all the most popular stuff, hoping some of it will take.

A word of caution: It will really shake your faith in humanity to see what the algorithm has calculated the average human is interested in.

 

[Koolau]

John Oliver seemed somewhat optimistic that (Spoiler Alert) Congress would do something about the issue since they can be targeted just as easily as the rest of the "unwashed." Of course, what he forgot is that Congress is notorious for passing laws that ether benefit them (but not us) or exempt themselves from the consequences of the laws they pass. Sounds like a pretty good gig but YMMV.