From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2015 19:26:13 -0400

Michael Magoulias wrote:

"To me, this just shows that this is all still too new for us to be
able to form coherent moral norms governing how people should be
treated once it is possible to reduce them to a set of highly
"actionable" data points, especially when they are seemingly so
complicit in this reduction."

+1

Joe Esposito


On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 6:43 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2015 02:57:51 +0000
>
> This thread continues to perplex, but it's a useful indication of how
> contradictory the collective thinking is when it comes to assessing
> activities on the web. Anyone who is seriously concerned about the
> public at large being subject to digital surveillance should focus
> their attentions on the organizations that are the real offenders,
> namely Google and FaceBook. (And they certainly shouldn't be using
> Gmail.) What Google and FB do is infinitely more pernicious than this
> trivial incident regarding Pearson.
>
> There seems to be a drive to consign the same activity to "good" or
> "bad" buckets depending on how we feel about the actors. If you feel
> Pearson is evil, then their near-monopoly over standardized testing
> and monitoring of users will also be evil. If you think Google is
> good, or perhaps simply not evil, then their even greater
> near-monopoly over search and their far more successful track-record
> of invisibly stalking their users and monetizing the results will get
> a free pass.
>
> To me, this just shows that this is all still too new for us to be
> able to form coherent moral norms governing how people should be
> treated once it is possible to reduce them to a set of highly
> "actionable" data points, especially when they are seemingly so
> complicit in this reduction.