Senator Amy Klobuchar floats idea of taxing companies that profit from user data

[JamesSWD]

No, no, no. We already know that most in Congress are bought & paid for property of Big Tech. They aren't doing a damn thing to nail all these companies abusing our user data. Taxing the use of user data will only make govt. salivate for more for abuse of our data, so that they can gain more in taxes.

 

[Underdog]

That's more of a wave-riding political speech than a practical notion. If you want to solve many of the problems of social media, move its functionality to the public sphere. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube have all become essential means of communication, and none of them have any real competition. Jeremy Corbin put forth an idea that every citizen of the U.K. have a public Facebook-like account if they wish. (If anyone is concerned about the U.S. and other governments having access to your personal data -- they already do.)
Public social media eliminate the problems associated with selling data.

"Facebook, Twitter, YouTube have all become essential means of communication,......"

Have they really? The first two are laughably puerile instruments and the third is simple entertainment.

 

[Panda218]

Tax tax tax...that's all DC knows how to do!

Klobuchar is radical among democrats.

You gotta be special kind of crazy if you think Klobuchar is radical left.

 

[wiyosaya]

I use Opera for my everyday browsing. I usually have Firefox open for mail at the same time, but it's locked down with "NoScript", and it's always a guessing game as to which scripts I need to give permission for a website to work correctly.

Obviously though, I'm being tracked on Opera to some extent. But its ad blocker does work very well, sites keep telling me to turn it off.

It keeps my old mind nimble though, when I get targeted ads, to remember where I visited before, as opposed to where I am now, (in the cyber world), when I got the ad.

Well, I (if I do say so myself), have an extremely high threshold of sales resistance. So, virtually 100% of all the horse poop people are trying to sell me, stays in their warehouse.

One fatal mistake a web surfer can make however, is to linger on a site you have no interest whatsoever in their product. You'll be counting ceramic figurines or similar, jumping over the moon as you try and go to sleep.

Unfortunately, the only sales pitches I can't resist, are my own. This can lead to high credit card balances.

That said, I keep my skills honed by answering the front door when I know full well it's Jehovah's Witnesses. This is like the Jujitsu of sales resistance, since you need to use your opponents own strength against them. I take the pamphlets, thank them, tell them to have a blessed day, shut the door, and then go back to worshiping Satan in my basement.

As I said, my approach is to disallow third-party cookies. That way, no search engine can pick up on the fact that you were browsing the Wheaties web site.

Until recently, the only web site I was giving blanket cookie setting privies to was Bing. However, I noted that Bling was giving me crApazon ads for what I had just browsed. So, I said, "OK, Bling. No more tasty third-party cookies for you, you're being such a bad, bad web site." And lo and behold, the crApazon ads disappeared.

I strictly use Waterfox - a 64-bit port of Firefox and I have the "Cookie Controller" plug-in installed. I also use uBlock origin and a script blocker - but those pesky third-party cookies are only tamed by Cookie Controller. Unfortunately, I cannot find a link to the addon anymore, but it still works in Waterfox.

 

[captaincranky]

...[ ]...I strictly use Waterfox - a 64-bit port of Firefox and I have the "Cookie Controller" plug-in installed. I also use uBlock origin and a script blocker - but those pesky third-party cookies are only tamed by Cookie Controller. Unfortunately, I cannot find a link to the addon anymore, but it still works in Waterfox.

After you mentioned the 3rd party cookies anoche, I found a direct setting in Opera to disallow them. I guess we'll see if it works.

I have trouble with Noscript in FF, a couple of my banking sites won't load, no matter how my permissions are set.

My AVG Free tracks me also. Every once in a while it will blow up a "your location, Zimbabwe, is exposed", warning, "You should sign up for our VPN". To which I mutter to myself, "oh that's OK, I'll be moving to Czechoslovakia in another 5 minutes or so, I'll sign up for a VPN while I'm there".

 

[Evernessince]

You gotta be special kind of crazy if you think Klobuchar is radical left.

Imposing a tax on something that should be illegal definitely sounds like a radical left idea to me. It certainly doesn't touch anything on the right that's for sure.