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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

That is really, really creepy. I will not pay money to or enter into any sort of business relationship with a real estate firm that wants to be on my Facebook 'friends' list.

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If you're in the uk, unfortunately you're at the mercy of the letting agents. It's already a racket and an incredibly invasive system, this is only slightly worse.

So what can we collectively do to ensure that businesses like this fail, fail big, and fail publicly?

Note who works for/with them and remember that if you're ever in a hiring position (or able to influence hiring)?

Since the people working to put this together clearly don't have the ethical sense to not-make this, at least they might think twice if there's enough understanding that producing flat-out evil might hurt their career prospects.

If society collectively decided to refuse them service for making such an invasive service, it's not as if they can complain.

What if an employee works for the company, but just needed a job and that was their only offer?

Knee-jerk answer: Not much, but we can start businesses whose sole goal is to bring 20th century style privacy to the populous. I'd pay $$$ for a monthly service that shields me from BS like this!

They will probably start something like that themselves.

Yup, that's the business model.

Campaign for meaningful tenant's rights?

One of the bots posing as an attractive woman that you added 4 years ago is already your friend.

As likely as that is for 98% of the population, everyone on my list is somebody I know face to face. And I don't put personal milestones/problems/drama on facebook. More like technology news posts about Keurig cup DRM systems, ipv4 exhaustion and old German cars. I'd love to see the inaccurate results of a profile created entirely based on that content.

This is why all commenters should avoid using the general 'you' when making hypotheticals, and instead talk about "a person" or perhaps "someone".

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