The internet is designed for corporations, not people
In this crossposting from The Conversation, Professor Gordon Hull delves into how Facebook’s data mining exercise was designed to create a hostile environment for the people it claimed to serve.
Urban spaces are often designed to be subtly hostile to certain uses. Think about, for example, the seat partitions on bus terminal benches that make it harder for the homeless to sleep there or the decorative leaves on railings in front of office buildings and on university campuses that serve to make skateboarding dangerous.
Scholars call this “hostile urban architecture.”
When a few weeks ago, news broke that Facebook shared millions of users’ private information with Cambridge Analytica, which then used it for political purposes, I saw the parallels.
ok
yes, I agree with the above sentiment
This title is complete nonsense.
The internet was designed for individuals FIRST before it was capitalised and the culture the internet was founded upon slowly eroded into the monolithic platform-centric beast it has become.
Anyone who was on the internet before Facebook would agree.
It may take a few more scandals before crapbook goes the way of MySpace, as they all do. As another poster pointed out, the internet (or parts of it) was hijacked by the corporates. It certainly was not this way at the start. This is to be expected as this is what corporates do: immorally appropriate resources and resell them (such as mining and oil companies). These scandals are driving people to look for ethical alternatives apart from the current monetized offerings. There are many open source “social media” (whatever that term _really_ means) projects out there aimed at replacing various parts of the rapacious monoliths. Some are quite advanced but time will tell if they take off. However it is now being realized that having a few capricious mega gatekeepers (youtube/google) is bad for “free speech” or transparency. The #deletefacebook movement is gaining momentum and eventually the open source offerings will rival the incumbents (as small nimble opponents always do). It must be noted that open source already dominates internet back end infrastructure (Linux, Apache, PHP, Bind etc). Together with being able to host cheaply in “the cloud” we have an emerging paradigm where educated and concerned users can wrest control of their content from the (soon to be) dinosaurs. But if one _must_ use the current conspicuously corrupted services, then a bit of social jamming by using all fake details should be de rigeur. It will play havoc with their precious “monetization algorithms” anyway. One final point to consider is that oversharing _anywhere_ will bite you on the bum. If you wouldn’t go shouting it out on the High Street, then you shouldn’t be putting it on the internet!