The person under surveillance in this article is a friend of mine.
I am today very happy that I have NO Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc accounts: none of my private conversations with this person are possibly subject to this fishing expedition.
Yet another reason to delete your accounts on these ad surveillance systems. (This includes gmail, for those of you still donating your entire purchase and travel history to the world's biggest ad company.)
I've been somewhat careful about what I put on social media, moreso lately, but I think you have really good points about this.
I've been somewhat Anti-Google for a while but explaining why they're bad to the average person falls on deaf ears. They won't care until google bans them or deletes all of their files. Google banning personal documents has been more publicized recently, but it won't slow the layperson down who thinks "nobody is interested in me" or "I'm not doing anything wrong!".
There will be a day that the Government and/or Google thinks you're doing something wrong and you'll lose out. We see FB handing out bans/timeouts for stupid things regularly, its only a matter of time before there's some government blocklist that they will all follow and be able to place you on...
Only corporate ad surveillance social media! I grew up on the internet and it is my hometown. I'm on IRC and the fediverse, and still anonymously browse reddit via the api, and run a bbs (link in profile).
Much of the best shit in my life came from weird strangers on the internet.
I love social media; I just hate advertising and surveillance.
I am today very happy that I have NO Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc accounts: none of my private conversations with this person are possibly subject to this fishing expedition.
Yet another reason to delete your accounts on these ad surveillance systems. (This includes gmail, for those of you still donating your entire purchase and travel history to the world's biggest ad company.)