Dickhead of the Week: Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri

Post by braythwayt » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 2:43 PM UTC

soneil wrote: post #45

braythwayt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're 100% right. Everything Apple does can be construed as "abuse" if someone is willing to argue in bad faith. iOS now tells you when one app pastes content from the clipboard, if the contents of the clipboard came from another app. e.g., You copy a zip code from Messages, and then switch to the "HN-Maps" app. If HN-Maps sniffs the clipboard in order to suggest that zip code as a destination, you see a notificatio…

Maps actually make a perfect example of why this needs to exist, even without malicious actors. Your zipcode example starts off as a perfectly well-meaning example of clipboard-sniffing, but after a very short meeting with "reality", quickly turns into passing strings to a geo API because there's a lot more addresses than just zipcodes we'd like to detect. And it just so happens that the most significant provider of…

Post by cma » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 2:45 PM UTC

agrippanux wrote: post #58

beaner wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've clearly never played Fortnite. Epic doesn't sell loot boxes, they sell skins. You get exactly what you pay for, there is nothing sketchy about it.

While I agree it’s not sketchy in that you get what you pay for, the true cost of what you are paying is obfuscated casino-style from their player base, which is mostly kids. Case in point, my son will want to spend 2500 vbucks on a skin until I put that into real dollars for him - “are you sure, that’s $25 of your money” (a bit less with package bonuses notwithstanding). Perhaps this is my penance for working on Far…

Post by Sebb767 » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

iforgotpassword wrote: post #33

syllable_studio wrote: post #19

I CAN'T WAIT for decentralized infrastructure to finally become robust enough that clones of instagram and facebook can all share a network -- they'll all become portals to the same social graph data. When that happens, there will no longer be any reason to put up with this abuse of privacy garbage.

Never going to happen. Ever. Decentralized means it's inevitably more cumbersome to use. If you make it easier you're taking shortcuts somewhere, especially if you want a platform that's resistant to censorship and is supposed to provide anonymity. And if you actually do succeed in this you'll inevitably end up with a platform where highly immoral content is just a wrong click away. It'll be this cycle of a new platf…

Post by vpears87 » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 2:48 PM UTC

shrewduser wrote: post #43

orev wrote: post #35

Watch “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix, see how far off the rails the industry has gone, then come back and tell me that Apple is the bad guy here. Someone needs to start standing up for what’s right, and Apple is probably the only one with the size and cash reserves to be able to do it. For all the free market cheerleaders, remember this: we already have laws in place preventing or regulating businesses from engaging…

Apple cares about their bottom line, they're privacy focused only because it works for their business model. If they stopped being anti right to repair then maybe i'd be interested.

Post by davidwparker » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 2:52 PM UTC

nobody9999 wrote: post #36

rospaya wrote: post #14

I hate being in a position to defend Facebook or Instagram, but independent of the size of any of the platforms, Apple is a gatekeeper for them, not the other way around.

>Apple is a gatekeeper for them, not the other way around. Given that Android has a 75% share[0] of the mobile OS market, that isn't really true. Apple is a gatekeeper for the 23% or so of mobile devices. I think that giving end users control over what data about them is exfiltrated from their devices is a good thing. And assuming that applies to Apple apps as well, it sounds like a win for IOS users. N.B.: I do not…