You need to fight fire with fire. Shave yourself bald.
Don't even joke D:<
Why not? I don't regret it. Not sure at this point if I'll ever go back.
Shaving your head is fine, as long as you're cool with it. So is pulling a Patrick Stewart and making a classy bald spot your thing. Dude lost his hair in his 20s, and he owned it. Still, it weirds me out how advertisers can sniff this personal data out, and prey on people's insecurities to sell them something.
Speaking of which... though absolutely terrified is an overstatement, Matt Lees' spot on Behavioral Manipulation in Games got me thinking about gamification and social engineering:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGvePm_jVCkBetween gaming and social networks, we're starting to get really good at manipulating human behavior for a desired effect; usually, that means logging in to a game regularly or renewing a subscription to a service. But there's
a lot of room to misuse these principals to prey on people, or to manipulate other facets of their behavior to be more in line with something else.
I don't know how much the fuss over Sesame Credit was just scaremongering. Just the idea is scary and plausible, though; a social network that rewarded a specific set of social behaviors, and reduced or took away those rewards if they had friends or family who didn't perform those behaviors. If the rewards were significant enough, you'd easily have people
wanting to police their friends and family into model behavior, perhaps even unfriending and shunning them if they fail to reform. It doesn't have to be used for negative ends (it could even benefit society) but it's still investing a lot of power into the hands of the people who decide that set of social behaviors.
So yeah.... I'm sorta thinking that we need to start thinking about legislation to protect citizens against psychologically exploitative games, advertisements, and social networks. It strikes me as a future danger for the health and well-being of society.