I still claim that TPB is even worse because the content creators get no profits.
If you were for example a commercial musician, what would you choose as your distribution channel(s)? Record store, Spotify, iTunes, The Pirate Bay?
It is not a good way because the music and software makers have not agreed upon TPB's distribution chain and the creators get no royalties or any other profits.
The torrent site owners, on the other hand, get some nice profits through aggressive advertising, which also sometimes puts visitors' computers on risk through malvertising.
Is this the proper way to help "break the media mafia distribution monopoly"? No. TPB is nothing more than an amateur website for people to distribute pirated stuff because it is fun.
They aren't doing anything illegal, and certainly there must be some country somewhere that officially recognizes that.
Do you realize that these guys have set up the infrastructure for massive online piracy?
What they are doing is maybe not technically illegal, but highly unethical.
It's no wonder that there are entertainment and software tycoons that want to seize the TPB operations.
And it's not at all difficult for manufacturers or even Google to put in a widget on the lock screen that shows WHAT features are being used by what apps. Facebook - little mic symbol, little camera symbol, for instance. And then you KNOW what it's doing.
That would be a great feature actually.
So what? It only uses the voice data to show specific advertisements. This does not differ from the way that Facebook has used text data since the beginning.
I know that this is kind of politically incorrect to say in Slashdot (and that's what makes saying it fun), but I claim that the benefits of Facebook still outweigh its drawbacks. My life is too short to ponder about some datamining. My data goes only through the advertisement engine and is not read by humans.
The real danger is that if NSA has a hotline to the data. That is nothing specific to Facebook, though.
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. -- Ambrose Bierce