you're rationalizing, i.e., looking the other way to avoid cognitive dissonance. but part of why we have such big brains is to anticipate the future, not simply accept events as they occur. what might the future you say? should we ignore that gas leak in the kitchen because it hasn't killed anyone yet?
it's important to expose this kind of mis-rationalization, especially when tiny individual harms accumulate otherwise silently to become population-level dangers (e.g., measles).
again with the misdirection. look the other way if you like, but you're letting google choose the information you access and believe (even with ads). if you don't understand the power therein, maybe you should study more of your namesake.
That's a fair point, but it falls flat with me personally the same way arguments about gun control and the potential to use guns in revolutions against autocratic regimes fall flat with me: it just seems incredibly unlikely in this day and age, at least in developed countries.
Like, the US once rounded up Japanese people and put them in camps. Using your same reasoning, one could argue that the government collecting any data on race/ethnicity anywhere -- like, say, on the census -- is a slippery slope to interning racial minorities again. And yet, almost nobody really cares in practice, because almost nobody thinks there's a realistic chance of that happening again.
Governments have also, at times, discriminated against people for their sexuality, or gender, so should the government never be allowed to gather any information on those attributes?
>it just seems incredibly unlikely in this day and age, at least in developed countries.
This opinion wouldn't be quite as naive if there was some magical boundary that keeps digital information solely in the hands of benevolent rulers in developed countries, but there's not.
>Governments have also, at times, discriminated against people for their sexuality, or gender, so should the government never be allowed to gather any information on those attributes?
That's somewhat like how some gun rights advocates say it's futile to ban guns because you can just kill people with knives, so why don't we ban knives too?
We're talking about virtually total information awareness which is far more powerful, problematic, and discriminate than knowledge of superficial attributes such as race and gender.
It involved the mass collection of personal information (what Google does in order to sell ads), which was then weaponized and used for purposes other than originally implied
You could say the same thing about the US census, and yet hardly anybody seems to object to it, despite the government having interned a whole race of people in its history.
it's important to expose this kind of mis-rationalization, especially when tiny individual harms accumulate otherwise silently to become population-level dangers (e.g., measles).