61–70 of 230 posts
Fb only stop doing things that are obviously morally reprehensible when they get caught or called out in the media. They never proactively doing the right thing. :-(
As context the HN submission of the techcrunch article, for those who missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19031055 . Strangely just vanished from the top position.
“Vanished”? It’s still in the top 15 as I comment here.
What a bullsh*t. People got some money for giving up some privacy. Nobody was forced to do this. And now everybody is freaking about a fairly reasonable trade. What's next? People will start harassing students/researchers that do paid studies?
I'm very interested to see what Apple's response is going to be. I'd not be shocked (in fact I'd be delighted) to see them penalize FB in some way, perhaps suspend their App Store account or something.
Remember when putting a picture of yourself on the internet or even using your real name was controversial? The old generation warned not to do it, ever! But teens did it widely and profusely. Now the new controversy is data. Don't ever sell your data! Don't give up your data! But teens are doing it widely and profusely. At some point you just have to accept that new people will be born and will have new ideas and ju…
This is the slow break down of society. Let's not cheer that on, shall we.
* Apple is probably the least guilty here, however as long as their OS remains closed, we don't actually know how much personal data they are harvesting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Caught doing what? What they did was perfectly fine. Legal even under the GDPR, and people were being paid for it, which is the usual lament here ("nobody is paying me for my data"). Admit it, you just hate Facebook.
What Facebook, politicians, and many others fail to understand is that there's a difference between legal and morally right. Facebook makes it exceedingly easy for people to hate them, while technically doing nothing wrong. Well sometimes they break the law, but then Zuckerberg just says he's sorry and we all move on. It's getting tiresome to watch our industry behave recklessly in the pursuit of ad revenue and the p…
I guess the first question is, if I do something illegal, but either avoid being captured or manage to otherwise avoid prosecution by using money or influence, have I done something wrong, legally speaking?
Because there is an argument to be made that making money off of children's consent to contracts is legally wrong, but because of the widespread nature of doing such by those who have enough political power to impact how laws are enforced, the laws are not enforced to protect children. That we aren't correctly enforcing laws that protect taking advantage of a child by using consent that can't legally exist does not make the action legally right, or if it does, then we are effectively invoking the notion of "it isn't illegal if you don't get caught".
If I tried something like this I’d have my developer account totally revoked and all my apps pulled; but I can’t imagine that happening to Facebook. It makes sense but it’s interesting that there’s a systemic de-risking of the way big players operate while simultaneously being in a position to do the most damage.
Meanwhile... Google, Microsoft and Apple* _receive_ money from their users to harvest the same personal data that Facebook is willing to pay their users for and nobody bats an eyelid. * Apple is probably the least guilty here, however as long as their OS remains closed, we don't actually know how much personal data they are harvesting.
This is quite a step up from sending home some telemetry data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Vanished”? It’s still in the top 15 as I comment here.
See http://hnrankings.info/19031055/ , for a moment it was on page 3, before it was #1. Happy to see it's back up a bit.
(in contrast, the similarly highly-upvoted Facetime bug thread [0] seemed to stay up longer, but no official fix had been made in the ~18 hours since it was first discussed)
Remember when putting a picture of yourself on the internet or even using your real name was controversial? The old generation warned not to do it, ever! But teens did it widely and profusely. Now the new controversy is data. Don't ever sell your data! Don't give up your data! But teens are doing it widely and profusely. At some point you just have to accept that new people will be born and will have new ideas and ju…
That's not how any of this works. It's hard to 'move fast and break things' when a company like Facebook has used all the loopholes and gotten caught.
Small players will never be able to replicate Facebook or their scummy tactics because at this point Facebook wants regulations. Regulations will ensure Facebook can and will continue to operate (can pay any fine) while the competition is hamstrung. If your competition is hamstrung it makes it easier to buy em up or wipe em out.
Just to come full circle Facebook purchased onvo so they could spy on users and figure out which apps they were using and how often. Facebook then used this data to buy up companies.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/12/05/facebooks-onavo-sp...