Maciej Ceglowski: Morality, Machine Learning, and Mass Surveillance

The economic basis of the internet is surveillance.

It’s an interesting phenomenon that people don’t feel quite the same about commercial surveillance as they do government surveillance.

• Gov is spying on us? [Pitchforks] Ah, hell no!
• Private company is spying on us? Meh.

If the gov made you carry a device with incredibly sensitive personal details like geolocation metadata, there could be protests in the street. But if it’s from a commercial entity we’ll do it voluntarily.

Google [is] the world’s defacto internet server. It occupies a dominant position in almost every area of online life. It’s unremarkable for a user today to connect to the internet on a Google phone using Google hardware talking to Google servers on a Google Browser while blocking ads served by Google AdSense on sites where trackers use Google Analytics and DoubleClick and whatever else