this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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But having that tracking shown to you has a very powerful psychological effect.
It's pretty well established that increasing penalties for crimes does next to nothing to prevent those crimes. But what does reduce crime rates is showing how people were caught for crimes, making people believe that they are less likely to 'get away with it'.
Being confronted with your own searches is an immediate reminder that the searcher is doing something illegal, and that they are not doing so unnoticed. That's wildly different than abstractly knowing that you're probably being tracked somewhere by somebody among billions of other people.
And where is the quantification and qualification for that? Spoiler: it's not in the article(s) and not one google search away. Does Nintendo succeed in stopping piracy with its show trials? If you have a look around here, it more looks like people are doubling down.
I mean, I know Google has been shitty lately, but Wikipedia isn't hard to find: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_(penology)
I'd wager Nintendo has put some fear into a few folks considering developing emulators, but that's the only comparison to be made here. The lack of any real consequences for individuals downloading roms is why so many are happy to publicly proclaim their piracy.
Now, I bet if megaupload added an AI that checked users uploads for copyrighted titles and gave everyone trying to upload them a warning about possible jail time, we'd see a hell of a lot less roms and movies on mega.
It would simply obsolete megaupload. Sharing platforms come and go. If one distribution channel stops working, people will use (or create) another.
Obviously, most of Mega's traffic is piracy, they have no interest in doing that. The point is it's an actual comparison instead of the nonsense you brought up.
Of course no individual site is going to singlehandedly stop criminal acts. Glad you agree it would be exactly as effective as I suggested.
Btw, you might want to read that wiki page in full yourselves.