> Instead of "privacy" we really should be talking about "control".
Fantastic. This is what I have been shifting towards these past couple years. Hardly anyone likes to be controlled, right?
> Instead of "privacy" we really should be talking about "control".
Fantastic. This is what I have been shifting towards these past couple years. Hardly anyone likes to be controlled, right?
They are separate but related concerns. Privacy is what you have (or don't have) right now. Control is what you can use to keep or throw it away in the future.
Apple gives you some privacy, better than most Android by default. But it gives you no control. If they decide you don't deserve privacy a year down the line, well, too bad.
I don't but it seems a LOT of people do. They even seem to prefer it.
Control means ownership. Ownership means work.
Until they've been burned by unspoken realities of not owning some piece of their own digital lives, most people will continue to prefer being tenants, rather than owners.
Technology is only the most recent domain in which we can observe the human tendency to prefer the short term, incurious ease and license not to think that tenancy provides over the long term, ongoing work and thorough understanding that ownership demands. To become an owner you need some deeper intrinsically cultivated reason to desire it.
> Until they've been burned
Or as someone put it: "You can't make people care".
Most western countries are democracies because people in the past got burned by dictatorships (including monarchies). Many of them died because of the dictators (whether they were forced to fight a war of conquest or imprisoned for saying the wrong thing). Many of them died to remove (kill, execute, make flee) the dictators.
There are 2 domains remaining where we still have dictatorships:
- Corporations. Not only do workers usually not have any way make decisions but they produce much more wealth than they actually capture. Cory Doctorow said that an average programmer makes $1M in profits for the company - how much does actually go into his pocket and to whom does the rest go? This is the core of rising economic inequality.
- Technology. This is what OP's article is about. There's not a clean hierarchical power structure you can point to but it's obvious companies have a huge power advantage over users.