Is Advertising Morally Justifiable? Philosopher Thomas Wells is out to change the way you think about Google and its ilk.
Wells says: "Advertising is a natural resource extraction industry, like a fishery.
Its business is the harvest and sale of human attention.
We are the fish and we are not consulted. Two problems result from this.
The solution to both requires legal recognition of the property rights of human beings over our attention.
First, advertising imposes costs on individuals without permission or compensation.
It extracts our precious attention and emits toxic by-products, such as the sale of our personal information to dodgy third parties.
Second, you may have noticed that the world's fisheries are not in great shape.
They are a standard example for explaining the theoretical concept of a tragedy of the commons, where rational maximising behaviour by individual harvesters leads to the unsustainable overexploitation of a resource.
Expensively trained human attention is the fuel of twenty-first century capitalism.
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We are allowing a single industry to slash and burn vast amounts of this productive resource in search of a quick buck."
I use Firefox browser with Ghostery and Lightbeam extensions to see who is tracking me gathering data and I get to see the third party sites.
You would be amazed what you find, try these great addons.
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Apple's latest patent filings shows that the company is looking into displaying advertising based on your available bank balance.
If Apple moves forward with this type of technology it would be a complete 360 on its previous direction to not monetize everything they know about customers.
Tim Cook has even said multiple times that companies are targeting consumers on multiple fronts and that he's completely against using customer information in this manner and its not the kind of company he wants Apple to be.
Uh huh...
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Study: Living Near Fracking Correlates With Increased Hospital Visits
An article published in PLOS One finds
increased hospital admissions significantly correlate with living in the same zip code as active fracking sites.
The data comes from three counties in Pennsylvania, whose zip codes mostly had no fracking sites in 2007 and transitioned to a majority of zip codes with at least one fracking site.
While the statistical and medical data are compelling, and speak to a significant correlation, the graphical and informational figures flunk every Tufte test, which is unfortunate.
Nevertheless, with open data and Creative Commons licensing, the paper could be rewritten to provide a more compelling explanation about the dangers of fracking to people who live within its vicinity, and perhaps motivate more stringent regulations to protect them from both immediate and long-term harm.
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Bloggers will just quit blogging...
According to a BBC report, the UK government is proposing increasing the jail term for copyright infringement from the current two years to 10 years, which they say would "act as a significant deterrent."
"The proposed measures are mainly targeted at the distributors of pirated content — the people creating copies of movies, sometimes before release, and uploading them to be downloaded by thousands upon thousands."
Another reader notes a related court ruling in the UK which has once again made it illegal to rip lawfully-acquired CDs and DVDs for personal use.
"A judge ruled that the government was wrong legally when it decided not to introduce a compensation scheme for songwriters, musicians, and other rights holders who face losses as a result of their copyright being infringed."
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Gonna get me some Cubans (Cigars!)
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