• 0 Posts
  • 4 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
Cake day: April 11th, 2021
  • Four_mile_circus@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Should I delete my existing bad social medias accounts or just let them die by stagnation?
    0·
    29 days ago

    I get where this take is coming from, but I’m not sure I agree.

    Some social media sites already block new users from using the usernames of deleted users, for just this reason.

    And scammers don’t need to copy your username to impersonate you. They just look at your public social media accounts, scrape a bunch of data about you online, and create a new account with a similar name. Then they message your contacts and say “hey, my account got hacked, this is my new account, here’s some personal information so you know it’s me, and also can you send me $500 by iTunes gift card so I can make rent?”. Happens on Facebook all the time.

    If you delete your social media account, the social media company still has your data (and probably many many backups of previous versions of your data) and can do whatever they want with it, but, scammers and data aggregators and surveillance agencies without access to that company’s internal data will have more trouble finding it. If you leave your social media account active, though, it’s still accessible to those third parties, and the data on it can help them build their a profile on you.

    In other words, deleting your account makes you safer.

    On the other hand, it does depend on what data you put on the account in the first place and what data miners can get out of it - in OP’s case, if their Instagram account only has a couple of landscape photos from ten years ago, it probably isn’t worth the effort to reactivate and delete - if it has a ton of person and location tagged photos that could trace where OP was and who they were with for a significant length of time, I’d wipe it.

  • Four_mile_circus@lemmy.mltoTechnology@lemmy.world•Big AI has PC users furious. Nvidia and Micron's weird emotional appeals make it worseEnglish
    201·
    26 days ago

    You could go further and say what’s happening now isn’t capitalism at all. Yanis Varoufakis calls the modern world economy “technofeudalism”: it’s controlled by information hypercompanies like Amazon, Google, and Apple, that make money not by producing anything, but by controlling the flow of information between consumers and producers, and charging producers rent for access to consumers.

    If you’re an app developer, you pay Google and Apple whatever they ask, and you follow their rules, or you don’t get to sell your product in their app stores; if you sell products, you give Amazon their cut, or you don’t get to sell in their market. And because Google and Apple and Amazon have so effectively entrapped customers, capitalists who don’t agree to their terms can’t get to their consumers at all.

    Capitalists aren’t the masters of the economy - they’re vassals. They pay their technofeudal lords their tribute, their 30% cut of revenue, and compete with each other for the remaining scraps. And then they raise prices and cut wages, squeeze their workers and exploit their consumers even more, in order to make enough money to survive at all.