Very interesting discussions.
Re: psychopathic CEO and founders, Brianna and Amy were saying that this is good for the companies involved and their share price, yet glossed over the fact that they do this at the expense of their employees and society in general.
It is as if the share price is more important than society in general and the company’s employees. I think this is one of the problems with the extreme capitalism we have now, everything comes down to share price and the more obnoxious your company is and the more damage it does, the better its share price and the more successful it is. Whilst profit is important, I feel it is given far too much weight, when it comes to share prices.
We should be rewarding companies for their social and environmental engagement and not for squashing employees, robbing customers blind and killing the planet in the process. Some companies are at least starting to wake up to the latter, although the “green” data centre from Apple in the middle of the desert that uses water evaporation for cooling is criminal, to me. “Look, our data centre is green, it uses renewable energy, it doesn’t use greenhouse gases for cooling, aren’t we great?” Erm, yes, but you are taking the most valuable and scarcest resource in the region, water, and wasting it by running it off into the air, instead of putting it to good use, like making arrable land or providing enough water to local communities.
They want to be green, yet they don’t think things through in some cases.
Re: hyper micro advertising: As a European, I was absolutely horrified when Brianna stated they were taking the electoral data and buying up medical information and comparing it to provide targeted advertising.
For a start, over here, that would be illegal. No medical information can be sold on and it can only be used for medical research purposes, when the patient gives their permission - in fact, when I get a referral from my GP to a specialist, the first thing I have to do, when I get to the specialists office is to sign a data protection waiver to allow them to access my medical information*.
This totally flies in the face of privacy and my gast was flabbered, that Brianna would actually use something like that. If I was a voter and I started getting political advertising targeted at my medical conditions, that would be the last person I would vote for. The same with adverts for medicine that were directly targeted at a medical condition, I would find that creepy and would look for an alternative product that wasn’t doing that sort of targeted advertising.
Luckily, such targeting is illegal here.
Edit: I re-listened to that segment, it was also location data. Again, selling location data, without the explicit written permission of the person being tracked, is illegal here. Telephone and mobile carriers are forbidden to sell PII to third parties, without getting explicit permission to do so from the individual.
Edit 2: When asked, whether it would be better, if all parties were banned from using such information for hyper micro advertising, she said, she didn’t know whether that would be possible, to legally stop people from cross-referencing different databases with each other. Erm, yes, it is. That is how GDPR works. You don’t get access to such databases, and when you collect information, you have to explicitly state what it will be used for and it has to be deleted after the shortest possible time** and it cannot be sold on without permission, and you can’t suddenly start using it for a new purpose, without getting each identifiable person to agree to the new use of that data - any that don’t agree have to have their data excluded from the new use.
(*) This will change, going forward, we will have an electronic medical folder, which we (the patients) hold the keys to and we can release that information to relevant (medical practioner) parties ourselves, but that is still in development.
(**) a report his week by heise’s c’t magazine shows that many COVID testing and test booking platforms had many security problems, but one of the biggest critiscisms was, that they were retaining the data after its use had finished. For example, if you are booking an appointment, as soon as the date and time of the appointment has been passed, that appointment information should be deleted, as it is no longer relevant. Likewise, test results are only valid for 24 hours, so after those 24 hours, the test results should be deleted.