How is this different than spy apps?

A thief may steal property but a liar may steal reality.

Pair two technologies we know already exist. They have shown us video that has been altered that most people didn't catch like Obama making statements he didn't make just used his millions of audio data to make a false statement and edit lip movement to match.

Now pair it with Google's assistant which can book appointments and interact in a way undetectable by most people. Good thing they don't have 15 years of you speaking, enunciating, divulging personal information over the wire...what you've been using Google voice for a decade? Google fiber too? OMG and your Gmail? Well heck mixed with customized video, your voice and knowledge of virtually everything you've said for two decades they could literally call your mama on Skype and tell her you'll be there for dinner.

So what's the big deal? Reality has effectively has been stolen from you. Your choices, opinions, and personality are based on lies and that makes you what they want to make you.
 

It's already enforced in this way for consent to a medical procedure or in academic research. Consent is not considered valid unless the subject understands what they are agreeing to. The frustrating thing for academic researchers is that we have to abide by these standards whereas commercial firms can write garbage in legalese and then do what they like..

I think we need to legislate that ALL legal TOS and the like be written in this type of CLEAR and concise and easily understandable verbiage.

There's no excuse for the common man to be held to agreements signed that no one but a lawyer can understand.

If the general public is to be held to these agreements, they must be required to be written in terms that at least a 15 year old can understand.

I know, I know, that's STILL above the heads of the average person by a long shot, but at least it is shooting at a reasonable level for public acceptance.

I think the government exists fundamentally to protect freedoms. That means that the freedoms of millions of innocent bystanders are more important than the desire to capture one miscreant, even if they have created one victim. One murder sucks, but it sucks less than denying privacy to everyone in the country.

Besides which, the percent of the GDP spent on the military is above 5%, IIRC.

Maybe he wasn't being sarcastic?

So a change that should be celebrated in every home, a shift from end of the species war to extinction to becoming a galactic species.

You think so?

As a Londoner, I've yet to encounter anyone who supported the Tube strikes:

... and your testing is useless, because you've just tainted the results by revealing far too much about the scenario. All of your subjects now act differently knowing they're being judged on their responses.

In other words, academics are jealous that real companies get to do more science than they do.

Do academic demographers get "informed consent" before processing census data? What about crime statistics? Network security incidents?

Facebook's experiments bother me more than OKCupid's. They're deliberately manipulating which news stories their readers see in order to affect their mood, and seeing how that affects the readers' behavior. That seems mean and dishonest. (Of course, I didn't know Facebook had news, so I'm not in their target market anyway, but it still seems mean.)

OKCupid's a dating site, which means that all their "compatibility" scores are pretty much guesswork anyway, assisted by a lot of measurement, so an occasional suggestion of "maybe you two should see if you want to date" to people they normally wouldn't match up isn't that much perturbation of their approach anyway, and "whoops, pictures are broken, why don't you try talking first instead of just looking at pictures" is just fine, and both of them give them a bit of data outside the ranges they'd normally be collecting from - perhaps there are people that would get along well who they haven't been matching up. (I'm not in their market either, fortunately.)

I think the dividing line between when you need to get informed consent is when the experiment begins to make people do things they wouldn't have done anyway. Tweaking how people get paired up for dates is fine if they were looking for a date anyway. Forcing them to go on a date when they weren't planning to would require informed consent (and probably compensation).

World discovers A/B testing
Freaks out
Until the next reality tv show comes on