Law in the Internet Society

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JeremyLeeSecondEssay 6 - 07 Jan 2021 - Main.EbenMoglen
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 This right to choose, when applied to the types of contracts that presently exist between technology platforms and their users (i.e. conveniently "free" services in exchange for behavior collection) could function as another useful tool against surveillance capitalism and help reduce the existential threats to democracy and freedom of thought. Some users may, of course, not have the means to pay for such a choice, while others simply might not care (today) about the consequences of their behavior being collected and sold. These concerns are valid, but should not preclude the adoption of such a right just because it may not be equally applicable to all users or produce systemic change on its own. Death by a thousand cuts might be slow, but can ultimately prove effective.
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One link could replace three footnotes.

Average revenue per user is not a very sensitive measurement. Like most efforts to understand something statistically, a mean without any measure of dispersion isn't helpful. Geographic breakdowns would be necessary in any event.

I'm not quite sure why what the services' cost isn't discussed.

Nor is it clear whether offering to pay a private cloud operator whose architecture is built around surveillance not to sell the subscribing user would be in any way better than getting the service from a differently-architected cloud provider.

Your Facebook analysis would be better if it treated all Facebook services. Declining average revenue per Facebook user tells us nothing if we don't also think about Instagram and WhatsApp. The recent change in WhatsApp privacy policy and quick mandatory implementation should indicate why.

If a user can buy these services not through subscription to a cloud provider, but through ownership of disposably-priced hardware, which is undoubtedly true, how should that affect the analysis?

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Revision 6r6 - 07 Jan 2021 - 23:22:36 - EbenMoglen
Revision 5r5 - 06 Jan 2021 - 02:07:30 - JeremyLee
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