It wasn't stolen, we're giving it away. And not just the web, but our freedom.
If you're using services that support surveillance capitalism or you are working on such products, please stop. Thank you!
We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
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Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
#32The web wasn't stolen we gave it to them. You didn't have to sign up for Facebook. You don't have to sign up for googles services. Look how people like RMS use the web .
It shows the problem with short-term vs long-term interests. For people it made a lot of sense to use these services individually. But collectively, it leads to undesirable outcomes.
"Collectively, it leads to undesirable outcomes."
Clearly, there have been very desirable outcomes for most people using these services. Otherwise, no one would use them. I don't think the short-term vs long-term tipping point has been reached quite yet.
Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
#33I've been thinking of closing my Facebook account, but I'd lose contact with so many friends and family. They don't use email or any kind of instant messenger any more, and nobody makes phone calls any more. If you're not on Facebook you might as well not exist.
Then don't exist. My wife and I dropped our accounts. Been great. We don't get involved in the SJW or the almost alt-right furors. We text our immediate loved ones. I call my mom. In their place we have actual friends. Real people that we play Cards Against Humanity with. Who understand that IBS means me dashing off and having my wife play my hands for a few hours. Then we go out and have a good time. If it's a choic…
This.
Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
#34This is just unnecessarily divisive. Look, this is the way commerce works. Checks on corporate behavior come in two realms, legal and ethical. Companies will violate ethics if everybody else is doing it. Companies violate the law if they are the proverbial bad eggs.
If unethical practices become normal, the thing to do is to get a law passed. It's the way this has always worked. Laws change the entire landscape of commerce. They shake things up enough to where a new status quo is found. Law isn't perfect but it can shift the ethical regime more in the direction of the people.
The author's recommendation of a world without kings is a fantasy. If you eliminate hierarchy that means everybody must become an institution. Being an institution is not fun. It's fun to fantasize about building your own house but only the really motivated actually do it. Kings do us a favor by creating structure where there once was none. Silicon Valley is ultimately a force for good.
Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
It shows the problem with short-term vs long-term interests. For people it made a lot of sense to use these services individually. But collectively, it leads to undesirable outcomes.
"Collectively, it leads to undesirable outcomes." Clearly, there have been very desirable outcomes for most people using these services. Otherwise, no one would use them. I don't think the short-term vs long-term tipping point has been reached quite yet.
You missed the part where the parent agrees with you - "For people it made a lot of sense to use these services individually"
That doesn't in any way invalidate that 'Collectively, it leads to undesirable outcomes'.
There are clearly undesirable collective outcomes that have resulted from this.
Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
#36There seems to be a lot of antagonism directed at Google and Facebook in this piece, making it sound as if those companies knowingly stole or forced people to fork over data. I know sometimes it's easy to play the evil mega-corp card, but we need to ask ourselves the question: what is the goal here, to take down Google and Facebook? 'Cause if you're worried about an internet with extra surveillance and restrictions,…
> making it sound as if those companies knowingly stole or forced people to fork over data Both Google and Facebook are engaged in exactly those practices. Stolen and forced are apt adjectives to describe their behavior. Stolen like Whatsapp data after acquisition by Facebook, like contact lists, location history, voice recordings from your Android phone. Forced like Facebook constantly demanding you provide them you…
Given the amount of people deeply involved in the tech industry who read hn probably my opinion will not be very popular. But I feel obliged to add a few lines about WhatsApp.
In a worrying technological landscape, it has been for a long time an application with a good tradeoff between privacy and convenience.
I have always respected and praised this application, due to its philosophy: Acton and Koum made millions of dollars without the need of advertising.
> Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. > These days companies know literally everything about you, your friends, your interests, and they use it all to sell ads. > Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product. > When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say “Have you considered the alternative?”
Like me, many people I know do not use social media (I'm 25 and not all of us use them, it's real), but virtually all of us use WhatsApp to keep in touch, share photos, locations, media, and even to create groups to discuss, meet, organize events.
We use the application in a so pervasive manner that we started considering it as a part of our daily routine: phrases such as "How long do you need to get there? Send me your position." are now regulars.
The reason we use wa, is because wa is not a social media.
Because "At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That's our product, and that's our passion. Your data isn't even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it."
Because when my mobile connection exceeds the data limit and my ISP applies a bandwidth throttling (32KBps) it is the only application that is able to send messages without making me worry about additional costs.
Because when loading an image, this is compressed in an automatic way. Because it allows me to call my relatives and friends easily and simply when I'm abroad.
The problem is not only the integration of wa data without prior permission, but also the recent decisions taken, aka "status".
Status is a social media thing, and nobody wants another useless social media.
All my friends are asking me - They do not know what to invent to know everything about us, right ? - Why this after end2end encryption ? - Do you see how little this is used ? - The reviews on the store are the worst of all the time ! Why did they do this ? - Not here ! Can I get the old version ? - I hope in many are gonna leave, which are the alternatives ?
When I see certain things I ask myself: `who made this decision and why`. I don't know if I have the answer to this, but I do not like the attitude. If things are going to get worse, I will uninstall without looking back. But it's a real shame.
This pattern has been emerging since the FaceBook acquisition, so I would bet this is intentional, it's an attitude, it's a vision.
The intent is not to "play the evil mega-corp card", I don't want to take them down, it's that I would prefer to pay a decent annual fee to a great service rather than being used as a product.
Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
It shows the problem with short-term vs long-term interests. For people it made a lot of sense to use these services individually. But collectively, it leads to undesirable outcomes.
"Collectively, it leads to undesirable outcomes." Clearly, there have been very desirable outcomes for most people using these services. Otherwise, no one would use them. I don't think the short-term vs long-term tipping point has been reached quite yet.
I'd say what's described in the post is an undesirable outcome.
"Otherwise, no one would use them." Cigarette smokers also find value in what they do (opportunity to contemplate, enjoyment, socialize) - yet the cost (for the individual and the society at large) is much bigger than the benefit. So just looking at the perceived value alone is not the best measure to evaluate the overall impact.
Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
#38This is just unnecessarily divisive. Look, this is the way commerce works. Checks on corporate behavior come in two realms, legal and ethical. Companies will violate ethics if everybody else is doing it. Companies violate the law if they are the proverbial bad eggs. If unethical practices become normal, the thing to do is to get a law passed. It's the way this has always worked. Laws change the entire landscape of co…
> Companies violate the law if they are the proverbial bad eggs
I would suggest that in general companies violate the law if the benefits of doing so exceed the costs (risk of penalties, imprisonment of officers and so on)
Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
#39I've been thinking of closing my Facebook account, but I'd lose contact with so many friends and family. They don't use email or any kind of instant messenger any more, and nobody makes phone calls any more. If you're not on Facebook you might as well not exist.
I'm in college right now and oscillate between having one and not having one, but most of the social life is organized through Facebook and I end up looking very odd for ritualistically avoiding it (well and Google Docs but that's a different kettle of fish).
I've had a Facebook account for 9 years now. When I first joined all my friends were on there if you wanted to go out for drinks you'd create an event. Party this weekend? Create an event.
Sometime around when I turned 30 people just stopped posting anything. Nowadays my feed is people I once knew in high school posting photos of their kids and my teenage cousin posting memes.
I can go weeks without checking the feed and miss nothing. I'm not going to shut down my account, a huge part of my 20's are stored there (holiday photos from multiple overseas trips etc) but I'm a very infrequent user nowadays.
Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
#40I've been thinking of closing my Facebook account, but I'd lose contact with so many friends and family. They don't use email or any kind of instant messenger any more, and nobody makes phone calls any more. If you're not on Facebook you might as well not exist.
Use a hosts file that blocks FB et. al. to try it out for a week or two. ;-)