> […] it's not necessary to drop a service as long as you get to control how it works for you
> The data mining and shadow profiling are the cost you pay for a free service
That seems a bit contradictory to me. If you could control how something worked, you could also control what data is being mined and so on. Fact is, you can't; even when you tell Facebook not to, they still manage to find ways to do so.
Also, once upon a time, data mining and shadow profiling were decidedly _not_ the cost we paid for free services. We got either generic advertising or targeted advertising based on the state of the page being visited, not a huge history based on every little thing we've done online.
We do well to remember that the way things are is _not_ always the way things should be, or even have always been. Apathy to our own plight and a short collective memory span are dictatorships' greatest friends.
> The data mining and shadow profiling are the cost you pay for a free service
That seems a bit contradictory to me. If you could control how something worked, you could also control what data is being mined and so on. Fact is, you can't; even when you tell Facebook not to, they still manage to find ways to do so.
Also, once upon a time, data mining and shadow profiling were decidedly _not_ the cost we paid for free services. We got either generic advertising or targeted advertising based on the state of the page being visited, not a huge history based on every little thing we've done online.
We do well to remember that the way things are is _not_ always the way things should be, or even have always been. Apathy to our own plight and a short collective memory span are dictatorships' greatest friends.