<story><title>Class action against Oracle’s worldwide surveillance machine</title><url>https://www.iccl.ie/news/class-action-against-oracle/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AndrewKemendo</author><text>This is how we collectively got here: &amp;quot;This product doesn&amp;#x27;t work for me, I want something that does.&amp;quot; We collectively asked for more product&amp;#x2F;service diversity, more on-demand personalization and lower prices and we got it.&lt;p&gt;We need to accept that the attention&amp;#x2F;surveillance economy is a natural outcome of high volume personalized markets. I did my undergraduate thesis on &amp;quot;Nash equilibria to predict consumer decision making under uncertainty&amp;quot; under Dr. Bruce Lister WELL before machine learning was even a core field of Computer Science.&lt;p&gt;People, individuals, you and me, demand increasing determinism from other stochastic humans so that we can better predict and manage our relationships with them. A corporation has the same instinct, so they are doing the reasonable thing and collecting data in order to predict the next state in the Markov Decision Process that is you.&lt;p&gt;Every major technology (and some non-technology) corporation either has built or is building a similar system to optimize you for their system. People have chosen by a HUGE MARGIN to join these systems because the non-hidden benefits outweigh the hidden risks. For the people that recognize the externalities some are pushing back (like these lawyers), but most people don&amp;#x27;t even know this is happening and honestly don&amp;#x27;t care because you get benefits from it.&lt;p&gt;The only thing shocking about this is that Larry said the quiet part out loud</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vesinisa</author><text>Your comment makes little sense to me on many levels, but I strongly object to your assertion that &amp;quot;people have chosen by a HUGE MARGIN to join these systems&amp;quot;. Oracle can not have possibly amassed consent from 5 billion individuals to mine data on them. People have certainly not opted-in for this kind of surveillance in exchange for &amp;quot;product diversity&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;lower prices.&amp;quot; These objectionable consumer surveillance databases are being amassed and maintained regardless of whether they actually benefit the people in them or not.</text></comment>
<story><title>Class action against Oracle’s worldwide surveillance machine</title><url>https://www.iccl.ie/news/class-action-against-oracle/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AndrewKemendo</author><text>This is how we collectively got here: &amp;quot;This product doesn&amp;#x27;t work for me, I want something that does.&amp;quot; We collectively asked for more product&amp;#x2F;service diversity, more on-demand personalization and lower prices and we got it.&lt;p&gt;We need to accept that the attention&amp;#x2F;surveillance economy is a natural outcome of high volume personalized markets. I did my undergraduate thesis on &amp;quot;Nash equilibria to predict consumer decision making under uncertainty&amp;quot; under Dr. Bruce Lister WELL before machine learning was even a core field of Computer Science.&lt;p&gt;People, individuals, you and me, demand increasing determinism from other stochastic humans so that we can better predict and manage our relationships with them. A corporation has the same instinct, so they are doing the reasonable thing and collecting data in order to predict the next state in the Markov Decision Process that is you.&lt;p&gt;Every major technology (and some non-technology) corporation either has built or is building a similar system to optimize you for their system. People have chosen by a HUGE MARGIN to join these systems because the non-hidden benefits outweigh the hidden risks. For the people that recognize the externalities some are pushing back (like these lawyers), but most people don&amp;#x27;t even know this is happening and honestly don&amp;#x27;t care because you get benefits from it.&lt;p&gt;The only thing shocking about this is that Larry said the quiet part out loud</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JacobThreeThree</author><text>How can the customer demand anything with respect to surveillance if it&amp;#x27;s not clear that it&amp;#x27;s happening? Just because a certain advertising mechanism is more effective than others doesn&amp;#x27;t mean that consumers are &amp;quot;demanding&amp;quot; that advertising mechanism, especially if the data collection part of it is obfuscated from the consumer.</text></comment>