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My “not a book review” of Careless People – the book Facebook doesn’t want you to read.

With highlights on Ireland’s complicity and the lengths people farmers (as I call them) will go to to appease authoritarian regimes like China.

ar.al/2025/03/21/careless-peop…

It’s clear from this that Ireland should be stripped of the authority to enforce GDPR and, really, people farmers – and the business model of people farming in general – should be banned in the EU.

(Don’t hold your breaths.)

#carelessPeople #facebook #peopleFarming #surveillance #capitalism #surveillanceCapitalism #BigTech #SiliconValley #ventureCapital #USA #fascism #technofascism #EU #Ireland #tax #GDPR #tech #humanRights #democracy

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in reply to Aral Balkan

@EUCommission

No, but I am. Nice assessment of the parts you read, and I can see why you stopped. One must consider that these "tell all" books only tell the all the author includes. At the risk of being Pollyanna, there's always a rebuttal they leave out.

That said, Facebook is evil. People farming is evil. But bans are unpopular and hard to justify to the masses. Until they know what Facebook is doing to them personally, no one will care.

Let's hope they read this book.

in reply to Aral Balkan

@EUCommission

That may be part of it. I recently went off the stuff, switching to tea. A more serene way to start the day, but the jolt is smaller.

in reply to Aral Balkan

@EUCommission surely preventing the delivery of our every thought, movement and action to the IT arm of the Russia-US axis is at least as important to our common defense as manufacture of munitions? Perhaps even (hear me out here) more important given that they have a propaganda machine delivering billions of messages per day to European eyeballs?

Might this even be an issue of sovereignty?

in reply to Aral Balkan

For quite some time I knew that the #irish #dataprotection institution was an underfunded, understaffed, weak #pontemkin village #bigtech was taking advantage of - and only #noyb was really getting on their nerves.

I ordered it yesterday and will have the book in my hands tomorrow ( certainly not from #Amazon, but local bookshop! )
Well ... feels like another not so nice day coming. :mastoshrug:

in reply to Aral Balkan

will adopt the "people farmers" phrase as it captures reality with the blunt starkness that it deserves.

This practice is really among the worst moral malfunctions in western society since slavery.

The combination of it being abstract, hidden, extremely lucrative and providing "services" people really liked has been fatal.

The generalized collapse we see is not unrelated to this fundamental sin (if I am put it in religious terms).

What will it take to abolish the new slavery?

in reply to Aral Balkan

just read it myself. I can't imagine anything happening, but you have to hope that some awkward questions will be asked.
in reply to Aral Balkan

I don't have the knowledge you do in relation to Ireland, but I had to keep putting the book down because it was making me so angry I couldn't sit still.

All of them belong in prison - Sarah included.

in reply to Aral Balkan

Wow, just when you think you can't think any less of the people at #Meta, you learn that there is no bottom.

#facebook

in reply to Aral Balkan

Bought a copy of this last week. Will read it after my wife finishes it.