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Comment by loginusername | Hacker News Reader

"There's more money being made from advertising than consumers are putting in."

Should we care how Google, Facebook and others make so much cash? Should it matter?

Honest question.

(The author suggests the firesales by these companies when things go south will involve internet users' personal information. I agree.)

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Assuming the conclusions are true, then it probably matters to you if you are employed or investing in a company trying to make money from this sector. Potentially, it could affect the investment community in general like the dot com bust of the 90s as well. People investing in or working for marginal startups may find themselves looking for work.

More generally, as companies die their assets will be sold off. These kinds of startups have virtually no tangible assets. Instead they have personal information. This will be sold, regardless of any previous policy. So if you were banking on the data privacy policies of an ad company to keep your data private, you might find that it is no longer in effect.

Of course, if there is an implosion then the price of this information will dwindle to almost nothing (given that there will be so much of it available). So it might not be so bad. Hard to say...

Still, hating to be the bear, but I really am expecting a correction in the start up field some time in the future. Personally, I wouldn't touch any SF real estate. But these kind of things are so difficult to predict ;-)

And interesting thing is how people are all up in arms about the NSA tapping private information, but are completely oblivious to advertising companies doing the same. At least the NSA's objective is to fight terrorism, companies like Google/Facebook invade people's privacy for the sole purpose of making money from it.

I implicitly agreed to Googles terms when I used Google. I never asked to be born in the States.

You never asked to be born, period.

You implicitly agree to citizenship by not renouncing. And in any case, the NSA may (supposedly) surveil non-citizens with fewer restrictions.

You have to pay to opt out of citizenship. Name any other club that you have to pay over 1000 USD to not be a part of.

Mafia

Anyway, the parent comment made no sense. Maybe people expect privacy because they're US citizens. But the NSA doesn't specifically surveil people for that reason.

You can't renounce your U.S. citizenship from inside the country anyway.

I do agree with you, though as a brief tangent (as if this horse wasn't beat badly enough here in HN during the past almost 30 months...), my personal concern is both political and ethical, and I suspect this same concern applies to many of us who see dragnet surveillance as a problem.

The political aspect is that whatever data there is about an individual can be used against them, selectively, for say political purposes. This is a gross violation of transparency and the principles of a democratic society.

The ethical aspect is that I am being spied upon because of what I am not -- because I am not a US citizen. The talk about whether US constitution protects US citizens from dragnet mass surveillance (and thus whether NSA spying is unconstitutional) outright disgusts me (although I do understand the relevance for US citizens, of course). Telling one to "not use US internet services" is like telling one to opt out from the Internet. It's a "tough cookies" argument with very limited practical applicability.

Collecting information about me to make money out of me by selling me stuff? Honestly, in comparison, that doesn't feel that bad at all. Luckily, browser add-ons like Ghostery and various adblockers mitigate this to an extent.

Ideally the ad exchange should be an independent and open system like the stock exchange. A user's private information should be carefully federated and controlled access given to various advertisers. This exchange should not be controlled by Google, but should be an open system. Just like you can buy shares for a business, you should be able to buy advertising rights to a user(or set of users). The money paid by advertisers should flow to the user.

It's easy to avoid ads and prevent ad tracking. Avoiding NSA surveillance is nontrivial. Maybe impossible.

Conversely it could be said that Google/Facebook invade people's privacy only to make money from it, while NSA might use that information for blackmailing, etc. - reasons directly affecting victims.

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