Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
6. Defend your opinion
This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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Apart from identity theft safeguards, the fuss over data privacy of metadata that was never private and voluntary information (especially information that could be found in a phonebook or gathered from public observation) always seemed overblown & misguided. I know
so why should I act surprised when they do what should be expected to offer that free service? People who do that strike me as a special kind of stupid: do they think the world just runs on magic?
Free shit in exchange for mostly worthless information & ads I ignore seems like an obvious bargain, but what do I know? Let's stir everyone into a frenzy to bitch & moan about the ravages of targeted advertising.
It is not a bargain, because not only can it be used against you in the future (e.g., an oppressive regime, EVEN if you're in another country), or someone you know. Furthermore, many of these companies track your usage of other services, regardless of whether you use that company's services or not.
I don't know, man. I assume they have information they may find in a phonebook; data I voluntarily gave social media & networking such as my school or employment, demographics, relations, peers, & whatever they can glean from peers; my shopping preferences; rough geolocation from my IP address; my ISP, OS, web browser, content I've browsed. None of this information is particularly valuable to me. It would take incredible effort for me to code & host a search engine or social media site or the various other free web applications I use. I value those way more than my junk data that is worthless to me, so the trade-off is obvious.
The government has access to much more sensitive information about me: social security; government issued licenses & registrations; birth, education, tax, property, police, medical, telecommunication, financial records. Only the law & procedure prevents it from abusing that access.
Without online data brokers, anyone could gather much of the same, less sensitive information about me though plain observation, public surveillance, or interviews: only time & effort discourages them. Seems like a lack of perspective.