One of the good things about HN is that the engineers working and building these features are likely reading these posts too, I'm curious how one implements these things. Are engineers (some of the brightest ones) not realizing that some of their actions are ethically questionable, or is the big picture not visible to the average engineer in a large company like FB? I assume that many have the exact same reaction and…
I have seen about 10% of my graduating cs class getting headhunted by Palantir Technologies. From that sample size I'd estimate the percentage of engineers who don't care about ethics to be at least around 10%.
I wonder if the index treats lobbying and donation millions to support elections as corruption. Such activities are illegal and considered corruption in most countries.
> I wonder if the index treats lobbying and donation millions to support elections as corruption. Such activities are illegal and considered corruption in most countries. Lobbying has nothing to do with donating money, and lobbying elected representatives is definitely not illegal in most democracies.
Lobbying as a term in the US is pretty synonymous with donating money. If there was a lobbying group that did not donate money you would have to specify that in conversation
"facts" with zero sources and an argument which could easily be dismissed/interpreted as stereotypical US centric argument.
You can simply use Google and check the facts out for yourself, it's common knowledge (children even learn this data in school in the EU). There were no sources in the comment I replied to either. Someone also replied with one of these sources. How can my argument be US centric when I'm European and have never even visited the US?
If you make a claim, you provide source to back it up.
Telling people to go and verify for themselves a claim that you made is just lazy and disingenuous.
I wonder if the index treats lobbying and donation millions to support elections as corruption. Such activities are illegal and considered corruption in most countries.
> I wonder if the index treats lobbying and donation millions to support elections as corruption. Such activities are illegal and considered corruption in most countries. Lobbying has nothing to do with donating money, and lobbying elected representatives is definitely not illegal in most democracies.
Correct. On average, EU and US have about the same corruption, at least according to the Corruption Index 2017 [0] [0] https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_percept...
I wonder if the index treats lobbying and donation millions to support elections as corruption. Such activities are illegal and considered corruption in most countries.
From their technical methodology note[1], they require their data sources to account for "state capture" and the usage of "public office for private gain". Take that as you wish, and feel free to look further at their sources[2]; however, I'd assume from that statement that they do account for lobbying and donations.
The US is not unique. If you see something happening here, it is almost always happening in other western countries, and acting like we are the only to have a problem does a disservice to worldwide development.
Perhaps there should be a central clearinghouse for people who don't want to be tracked by certain sites. How can you tell facebook to not track you without a facebook account? The best you can do is block various known IPs or other patterns which are bound to change over time.
How to tell Facebook that I don't want to be tracked? By not having a fucking Facebook account! it seems to me that's actually the crux of that court decision.
...or the site dies if ads are non-compliant. If there is some vacuum, it'd be filled by other monetization schemes.
What other monetization schemes? Noone is going to pay for access to a page with funny pictures, the site will cease to exist. Everything else will be behind a paywall and you call that an improvement? Up to this point in time, everyone had access to news, videos, science articles etc - for free. Those who didn't like being tracked had numerous options to avoid it. They also had the option to stop using these trackin…
> Noone is going to pay for access to a page with funny pictures
So the site will die, because nobody thought it had any value.
What other monetization schemes? Noone is going to pay for access to a page with funny pictures, the site will cease to exist. Everything else will be behind a paywall and you call that an improvement? Up to this point in time, everyone had access to news, videos, science articles etc - for free. Those who didn't like being tracked had numerous options to avoid it. They also had the option to stop using these trackin…
> Noone is going to pay for access to a page with funny pictures So the site will die, because nobody thought it had any value. What's the problem?
Eh, what's the problem? That a business (someone's living) was pointlessly destroyed, maybe? How do you know that people thought it had no value? It had enough value that they didn't care about all the ads, at least.
Because that destroys a whole industry of sites that are not good enough for people to pay for them, but thanks to the economy of scale, they can create quality content (and a living out of it) anyways. Your claim that it is not needed is proven not true by the very existence of these sites. There are many blogs that are sole income of many people, this will now cease to exist. How is that a good thing? This argument…
A free market only ideally represents the needs of people if people in fact express their needs. Aggregating user data and using it without consent does not fit that model. There is no obvious reason to believe tracking users "represents the needs of people".
Thanks to data collection and aggregation, the ads are targeted better, and thanks to that, the sites are earning more, and thanks to that, small scale content creation is a viable career. Now that ad revenue will be most definitely cut down to almost zero, a whole sector of small content creators will be destroyed and move to centralized platforms such as Facebook will be encouraged (because only on centralized platforms enough data can be collected in order to properly target ads, because that is the only remaining way how to have at least some audience and because it's free).