461–470 of 719 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Congress can, and should, make it a crime.
It would be very difficult to make this a crime, because a lot of customers WANT companies to be able to track everything about them. What they don't want is for their information to then be sold and passed around willy-nilly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would be convincing proof according to your standards? The complete implosion of democracy? The visible persecution of some minority? Tracing everything back via a proper legalistic paper trail to the actions of a single corporate entity? That's not how the road to hell is usually paved. Who redefined "Terms and norms"? Who declared that privacy is dead? The problem really is that people have normalized a practi…
Yes, FB or anyone else should be punished only after violating a law written down for everyone to see in advance of the action that supposedly violated that law. The road to hell is built by ignoring the rule of law to go after whoever is "bad" in the moment. There's an ancient legal principle called "nulla poena sina legal", which means "no punishment without a law". It's the foundation of all justice. Here's a clas…
Is there something nefarious if society legislates that a (upon closer examination) certain practices that were previously granted tacit or explicit approval are actually undesirable on a forward going basis?
To me this is a fake story being promoted as a way to further a political narrative. Nothing the whistleblower has revealed is shocking or previously unknown. Yes facebook tweaks an algorithm on your news feed to drive engagement and make money. Yes facebook allows some content that some would consider not to align with mainstream US narratives. My two cents this is an attempt to force facebook to kowtow to the US an…
It’s not “unknown” to technologists. How it all works is very unknown to the average parent. This thread seems to think the government needs to function with the logic of this thread in mind. Pretty entitled to believe you’re the only perspective worth listening to. Any individual is just “one of seven billion.” Shut the computers off and what perspective do you have that puts you above anyone else?
No one complains about not knowing how proximity sensors work in their car. They're just happy that they work and there is in theory someone who keeps the manufacturers responsible.
And I think that's the real issue here. Software for years has been treated outside of some very small instances as a value added affair and thus not worthy of investigation or oversight beyond those who fund such development. So all software companies outside of specific situations have been allowed to do what they will so long as it works well enough. Now it seems the situation has gotten more complicated because of the impact of software on non-software conditions/situations. But giving it over to Congress who currently is dominated by the Silent Generation and Boomers who aren't largely as tech savvy or educated to write legislation that will likely benefit Facebook and destroy the Internet as we know it (probably returning to a version of AOL and the like) is in my opinion the worse possible option.
I'm not for laissez faire policies but I'm certainly skeptical of Congress not intentionally making claims that their laws will protect privacy all the while they open the Facebook surveillance machine to law enforcement to spy on me and my own in violation of the 4th amendment. And knowing how this SCOTUS who's been virulently anti-privacy especially among the conservative justices then this will be much worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is news to me and frankly makes no sense. How does the data say that FB both improved mental health and harmed it? Can you share your source?
That seems pretty straightforward to me - there are a huge number of teenagers who use Facebook, some of whom say that it improved their mental health and a smaller group who say it made it worse. The media reporting only talked about the teens who said Facebook was harming their mental health rather than the broader picture. Which, if accurate, would mean that closing down Facebook would actually hurt teens' mental…
I fundamentally do not understand how we've gotten to a point where social media has become anything other than a completely optional indulgence that we engage with in our free time to gain not-critical ephemeral pleasure out of. This cultural addiction to social media has caused us to throw our beliefs and convictions right out the window. People on HN are talking about breaking up Facebook, passing new "social medi…
Because they worked really hard to become indispensable and get people "hooked". You could make the same arguments about cigarettes, oxycontin or gambling.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything was legal until the lawmakers made it a crime, even stalking from bushes. As the society evolves, we introduce more and more laws to govern it, just as some laws are retired.
So the original claim should have been "nothing is a business model, everything is a crime"?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My public information is not tied intimately to my behavior and social circles.
Unless you live in a shed in the Rockies, I got bad news for you.
I'm not under an illusion that I myself am personally anonymous. I'm sure I leave enough breadcrumbs around the Internet but that's my (dubious) choice. However, force me to verify my identity, use my real name, or enter a phone number and I lose that opportunity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You fight misinformation with more information, not censorship. Unless you're saying other people are so stupid we need to control their content so they can make the right choices? At that moment, let's just keep everyone in a jail cell so they don't hurt themselves. Who is the arbiter of truth? The government? You?
> You fight misinformation with more information, not censorship. This is a flawed model. At some point, there is so much information that nobody can conceivably consume it all. A better mental model for this dynamic is that of pollution: can you fight pollution by making more "stuff", or at some point does it make sense to try and clean out the junk? > Unless you're saying other people are so stupid we need to contr…
Right, a "decentralized process". Which is entirely at odds with having authority figures censoring all unpopular opinions and dissent. You say we don't need an arbiter yet you argue in favor of creating one, intentionally or not.
The current discourse seems to be based mainly on insinuations that FB/IG actually harms people on the basis of a small fraction of struggling kids reporting that they feel worse when they look at Instagram. But, would anyone have predicted otherwise? That literally no teen who reports suicidal ideation would attribute their issues in part to what they see on social media? Or perhaps that's a strawman -- would we not…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/16/faceboo...
https://web.archive.org/web/submit?url=https%3A%2F%2Fabout.f...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It’s not “unknown” to technologists. I think the odd bit is that if this information isn't unknown to anyone in technology, even those not working on similar systems, then how is this "whistleblowing". It's like calling informing people about marginal tax rates "whistleblowing" because so many people don't understand how they work.
In this case it's a specific term related to SEC whistleblowing protections. The context is not about whistleblowing for some semblance of public protection, but whistleblowing for protection of investors who may have been misled.