{"id":41330,"date":"2018-12-06T06:45:00","date_gmt":"2018-12-06T11:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41330"},"modified":"2018-12-06T06:45:00","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T11:45:00","slug":"the-creepy-line-a-new-documentary-on-the-immense-power-of-tech-giants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41330","title":{"rendered":"The Creepy Line: A New Documentary on the Immense Power of Tech Giants"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Creepy Line: A New Documentary on the Immense Power of Tech Giants<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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The Creepy Line<\/a><\/em>, a new documentary by director M.A. Taylor, is now streaming at Amazon Prime. It takes a disturbing look at how Google and Facebook influence their users\u2019 view of the world, and how the companies have pioneered new ways of doing business. It\u2019s a business model in which personal data harvested from users is exploited so as to offer targeted advertising to third parties.<\/p>\n

The Creepy Line<\/em> takes its title from a description of Google once uttered by Google executive Eric Schmidt who said Google\u2019s mission was to \u201cget right up to the creepy line and not cross it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In truth, though, by pioneering the \u201csurveillance business model<\/a>,\u201d Google has been been stepping over \u201cthe creepy line\u201d for years.<\/p>\n

Is is perhaps in its basic explanations of how the surveillance model works that The Creepy Line<\/em> is most interesting: the filmmakers explain in simple terms how a small number of companies have come to compile extensive data profiles of many hundreds of millions of human beings, and how that data is the real product sold and used by the companies that collect it.<\/p>\n

This, of course, has always been the plan, although it was arguably much more modest at one time.<\/p>\n

The Surveillance Model<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of money to be made by helping advertisers target specific potential customers. But first you need a lot of data on the people you\u2019re targeting. Successful tech giants can offer this data \u2014 and huge amounts of it.<\/p>\n

In order to offer advertisers data on potential customers, though, a company first has to collect it. And in order to collect it, the company must offer some sort of bait for the users to seize upon, thus leaving behind their personal data.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Creepy Line: A New Documentary on the Immense Power of Tech Giants The Creepy Line, a new documentary by director M.A. Taylor, is now streaming at Amazon Prime. It takes a disturbing look at how Google and Facebook influence their users\u2019 view of the world, and how the companies have pioneered new ways of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[8126,23367,11736,1493,378,23366,14776,1169,23365],"class_list":["post-41330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-activist-post","tag-amazon-prime","tag-documentary","tag-facebook","tag-google","tag-m-a-taylor","tag-ryan-mcmaken","tag-social-media","tag-the-creepy-line"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41330"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41331,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41330\/revisions\/41331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}