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Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to forget on HN, but there is far from universal buy-in for the notion that having or collecting data on people is unethical. Some may even consider it noble to optimize and perfect the world and its institutions (including commerce, via efficient advertising) using large-scale personal data.

The impulse to make something better by applying a database engine that you might feel for business processes, can just as easily be felt for customer interactions or the world at large.

For an interesting (and very critical) look at this philosophy I recommend The Circle by Dave Eggers.

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It's not even just unethical, it's also illegal in many places. Facebook (and Google and many others) are constantly violating European privacy laws and hide behind the Irish government who protects them against the rest of the EU. As an example, in Germany, data privacy is a basic human right and in theory things like the FB Like Button or Google Analytics just collecting data in the background without a user knowing is illegal. In theory, any site using Social Plugins/Google Analytics would need users to opt-into the data collection, but of course nobody does this and going against FB/Google for these kinds of things is near impossible right now. See http://europe-v-facebook.org/ for more information and examples.

The current EU data privacy guideline will be replaced by a regulation in 2018 and Safe Harbor has just been replaced by Privacy Shield for EU->US data transfer, but it will probably not change much.

Compared to the EU, in the US data privacy is hardly existent but people seem to accept it.

edit This is not even touching on the fact that all the data these US companies mine of European citizens is also accessible by the NSA in one form or another (no, Privacy Shield does not effectively prevent this) and the implications that arise from this.

> in Germany, data privacy is a basic human right

This! Seriously, there's moral relativism and there's squabbling whether a human right "would be nice to have". They/we don't call it a human right lightly. It's to shine a spotlight on something very important that people otherwise don't realise.

> This is not even touching on the fact that all the data these US companies mine of European citizens is also accessible by the NSA

Well in a way, it does. Total surveillance by governments that openly admit you have zero rights in their eyes (as do their citizens, by the way, many times, even on HN ...) is one of the many terrible implications of the existence of these databases.

The US doesn't have the privacy parts is WWII in memory. Where govt workers had to scramble to destroy what data they could before it was seized, where fire fighters let document storage burn as long as possible because it had census data, where others where forced to go through govt. Data to sentence neighbors to death, and similar hero/horror stories.

I feel that the IT world is irresponsible in its collection of data, and doesn't treat it as the liability it is.

(What's the proper word for old data/information before computers)?

> I feel that the IT world is irresponsible in its collection of data, and doesn't treat it as the liability it is.

A lot of that is due to a lack of training. There's two major ways new people come into programming.

1. Go to college, get a computer science or engineering degree.

2. Self taught.

Neither of those prepares you to deal with the ethics of information storage.

I happened to have an entire course on the topic but only because I took an Information Science minor with my Computer Science major. That course wasn't even an optional elective for me otherwise.

A computer science degree trains you for thinking how to do something. It doesn't teach you how to figure if you should do something.

You can be lucky if a college education in CS/SE teaches you about open source licensing, even more so if it deals with privacy in any way.

IMO every SE curriculum should contain a mandatory course looking into historical precedents how information was used in genocides and oppressive regimes (Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic are two of the most obvious examples but there are plenty others).

It's ridiculous how it took Trump to get elected for the liberal techies in my Twitter stream to realise that the US government has the power to do really bad things with all the data FB & friends have been collecting.

What literature did the course provide? I would like to teach myself more too. The lack of any so far in my programme is making me really pessimistic.

>(What's the proper word for old data/information before computers)?

Files.

Yep. I also remember hearing "records" in addition to "files" back in "the day". The reason, of course, these terms have come into computing is by analogy with their "old-world" counterparts.

That said, I wouldn't consider it wrong, per se, to call it data or information these days. Strictly-speaking, old files and records do constitute data, whether they happen to be digitized or not.

If the ability to enumerate targets for holocaust is our concern, then tech companies are a bizarre place to start caring. The institutions we should be attacking are the DMV, voter registration, and the Social Security Administration

Why that? The data collection you're talking about is relatively constrained and transparent - all those institutions have a well-defined range of data they are allowed to collect, using well-known procedures.

On the other hand, the data private organisations collect is not restricted - neither what data is collected, nor how or from who.

If voter registration started to ask for skin color, there would be immediate public outrage. If credit scoring services include skin color as a scoring factor, it's a trade secret...

Why does the subject knowing about it make it any less useful for genocidal purposes?

You pretty much need a state ID or drivers license, which lists your skin color. Political contributions are a matter of public record for anticurruption purposes. Vital records offices are more than sufficient for tracing ancestry. Welfare offices know who is poor and medically needy. Telecoms and the post office knew who you communicated with.

There was more than enough information to mount a holocaust on any of those axes long before the current crop of tech companies.

Skin colour, religious and sexual preferences ... One can only hope the next dictator shares your lack of imagination.

Also it's a bit of a bizarre argument that tech companies are doing data collection on such a massively intrusive scale, we should really look at the government databases first because they're already more than enough to screw us over with? It's not even a "but they're doing it more!" ...

Different, though: Now its all in one place, stored forever, and in much more detail: your cell phone leaks your location continuously and in real-time, your photos and videos provide detail we are only just learning to harvest, your formerly secret or at least hard to track written communication is now trivial to record and analyze, and with the coming of IoT all this is just getting a bit more minuscule. Future governments seeking for unwanted persons will have an unprecedented dataset to profile whomever they might not agree with.

Again, this worst case scenario may not happen, but the fact that it can, even if only with a small chance, makes this massive data collection totally irresponsible.

The problem is misleading the public about the nature of the information gathered and the shady ways that the information is sometimes used. If Facebook were only gathering information necessary to improve the experience of its users, and were not selling that information or lying about it, I don't think you'd see the same backlash.

> If Facebook were only gathering information necessary to improve the experience of its users, and were not selling that information or lying about it, I don't think you'd see the same backlash.

Facebook doesn't sell information, it sells ads. That's not the same thing.

They sell ads by offering this information in the form of targeting.

I've worked at an ad-serving company. Clients couldn't get our data out, it's behind the scenes to them. Business-wise, it would be undermining our own product to offer anyone's personal information. There are other companies that do this focusing just on the collection side, which sounds like what FB is buying - but for FB to protect their position they're going to try to keep lids on that.

The companies that try to sell those types of profiles, by IP or cookie syncing or whatever, seemed to get it wildly, wildly wrong - but the role of accuracy/auditing in the ads business is another discussion. FB seems to be buying a different sort of data than we were, since they know so much more (first/last/birthdate, etc).

Anyway, this is a problem that doesn't start or stop with FB, and the brokers are the dangerous part.

Starting a database with personal information on a large amount of personae. Without them knowing about it. Refusing to share the gathered information. All of this is legal in the US? In the EU???

The EU has restrictions on this kind of stuff - http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/data-collection/...

I worked for a few years at a company that provided a SaaS IVR product. Think call centre call routing, and PBX features on any dumb phone.

As people shy away from phone calls, and with the competition of VoIP, we gradually saw the erosion of the price per minute we could charge (roughly 40% drop over the course of 5 years).

The company tried to shift by looking at the data we had available. Millions of phone calls, and we knew exactly what kind of service was being called. Banks, airlines, airports, sex lines, restaurants, customer support, whatever. We could see when people called most, for how long, and we even knew which service inside the call centre they were talking to.

It wasn't long before the company wanted to exploit this, and they started working on the ability to play ads while people were waiting to get in touch with a service representative. Targeted ads.

Based on phone habits, we could tell whether the person calling was a stay-at-home parent, retiree, teen, young professional, etc. We could also tell their gender, in 60-70% of cases.

Because of the technology, we had access to actual phone number, even when people called with restricted identity. It's just how it works when you are registered as a "network operator".

This shift from "let's provide an amazing service" to "let's mine the crap out of everyone" definitely contributed in my leaving the company.

> I've worked at an ad-serving company. Clients couldn't get our data out

That's not really possible. Proof: Say Alice is your client, and her ad targets gay people (even though the ad or the advertised product itself is not necessarily related to being gay). Then using your data about sexual preference, you serve the ads only to gay people. Only gay people will see the ad, and thus only gay people will reach Alice's website. Hence Alice got the data out. QED.

They have to make money somehow, don't they?

The mafia defense? Really?

Why not, you are using their "free" services, and if you would care to read every word of the user agreements then it lays out exactly what they information they "collect". What they "collect" and what they "know" are two different things, using data analysis they can speculate many other aspects of a user with a pretty high degree of accuracy. They should not have to disclose this, the user has given them the data as agreed. If the media and privacy nuts didn't always put an evil spin on it people might actually realise that things in life aren't free. I know many people who enjoy using facebook for free, so why shouldn't Facebook make money from that. Just because they know alot about you doesn't mean that you absolve responsibility for giving out so much information in the first place.

mafia is free as well... you could not use their "service" but suddenly you realize you can't, because you're cut out (depending on where you live in Italy this could be literally true, you're just cut into pieces) if you don't.

Giving information directly to facebook is one thing. The article is about FB gathering info not directly given to them.

Imagine the government put a policeman on every corner and they recorded the movements of every person in the neighborhood at all times. 4:36pm Mr. Jones walked to newsstand, 4:43pm Mrs Jones opens front door, looks around, closes front door. 4:45pm Mr. Smith dog starts barking. 4:51pm Unknown man shows up at Mr. and Mrs Miller's house. Mr Miller is not home. She invites him in. 5:01pm Mrs Wayne tends to her tomato garden.

Many (most?) people would feel creeped out to know they are being constantly watched and all activities logged. And yet Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and a bunch of others are trying to do exactly that through your computer, your online activity and through your phone and eventually they'll probably also do it with cameras and mics

It is rumored that some metro systems are utilizing face recognition technology. Also, I'm pretty sure our license plates are scanned and recorded as we drive throughout cities.

If you want your client/user/customer to be aware of something you put it on your front page or packaging in plain language and a large, legible font. T&Cs/TOS is where you obfuscate information that you're legally obliged to 'inform' people of, but you really wish you didn't have to and you hope they'll never see it. Nobody reads the T&Cs of every product they use. I know this, you know this, everyone knows this. To suggest otherwise is either naive or disingenuous. It may be commonplace but it's really not ok and we shouldn't accept it. To defend companies doing this is enabling and shameful IMO.

Surveillance could indeed have many beneficial uses in a benevolent, voluntarist sort of society. Unfortunately we don't live there. The world is still largely run by warlords, narcissists, and sociopaths.

The "standard" counterargument here is that warlords, narcissists, and sociopaths can only operate effectively in private, and their capabilities would be severely limited in a world where secrets are hard to keep.

I understand you don't necessarily buy into that argument, but allow me to offer a counter-counter.

That argument relies on the collected data being closer to the truth, than the absence of it. I think that may be true for (statistically) normal people. But for narcissists and sociopaths, it may also be a helpful tool for someone creating a fake alter ego of benevolence and 'harmlessness'.

Why would the warlords, narcissists and sociopaths get rid of their own privacy? Zuckerberg seems very keen on preserving his...

Most likely simply don't think about it in enough depth to form a view either way. Collecting data to make the app make connections better is the "acceptable" view. The artificial bubbling is probably widely known - as it's recently hit mainstream thanks to all the fake news.

The implications and other uses and data transfers are not talked, or often known about. Just like when you look into food production or global supply chains you find many inconvenient truths there too. As age is so often correlated with cynicism it's probable that many tech applicants (to FB or anywhere) are simply not adequately cynical yet. There's quite a few cases of high profile techies suddenly and surprisingly (well according to reportage anyway :) becoming rather anti.

btw I thought The Circle far too gentle, and simplistic, about the criticism.

Perhaps it's the "cynical Brit" perspective as I felt very much the same about Black Mirror after arrival at Netflix.

It's not because one doesn't think it's unethical that it is ethical. The very existence of the question implies that there is an ethical issue here.

Moreover, in the age of information, the one who knows more about the other becomes a potential predator (every country has secret services and spies).

Facebook (and others) knows a lot more about me than I do myself because their computers don't forget, because they analyze what I do in a way I don't.

Moreover Facebook can be tied to other companies or institutions with my consent.

So although the optimization might seem like a good idea, I think it also needs to be put in context. Is this really a good idea. Is optimizing advertisement a noble goal ? It's useful for the advertisers, true. But is it useful for their targets ?

The problem I have with it is that Facebook decides what "improve" means -- it tries to groom me like cattle rather than ask me how I want to experience it or who I want to be "optimized" in to being.

And that's okay, so far as they're open about it. But I don't think they are, especially the sophistication of their psychology research (and experimentation).

If you don't like Facebook, don't use Facebook.

I think the problem rests more on the fact that as it stands Facebook profits regardless as to whether or not you use it. The same collection happens across numerous non-Facebook sites and apps, from data other people reveal about you, from apps and companies that are bought up by Facebook, and so on. The idea of "if you don't like it just don't use Facebook" becomes very difficult to implement when modern existence feeds into Facebook it seems.

It's the involuntary participation in facebook's arrangement that people are bothered by.

Not an option. They have a shadow profile about you anyway.

Aside from that this is as silly as "If you don't like organized crime don't buy stuff from the mafia and there's no problem."

Actually, if you don't like Facebook, litter it with disinformation until it becomes an unreliable and undesirable source.

> If you don't like Facebook, don't use Facebook.

And don't use any site with the Facebook "Like" thumbs-up thingy, which is tracking what sites you visit.

I blocked those pesky buttons using Ublock no social list.

I appreciate that, but most people don't know how they want to experience it. E.g. people will say they want to see everything in their feed, but if they do get everything, they complain about how much crap there is

The assumption being that this is not how people want to experience it?

If there's so much crap, maybe I want to be able to complain about it.

People might act on the tsunami of crap in manners that may not be profitable for Facebook.

The solution to undesirable, stupid, homeless, uneducated, etc etc isn't to hide it from your vision.

About twenty years ago we probably surpassed Orwell's 1984. Until ten years ago, the secret services of the world's governments would have done just about anything to get this kind of personal data. Five years ago, Facebook & co (twenti in Spain, vkontake in Russia, etc.) started to convince people to hand that info over for free. Today people are saying that somehow improves their lives, or that they have "nothing to hide". What do you think will happen when, in a few decades in the future, your personal, detailed history ends up in the hands of a government that is rattled by debt, ever increasing poverty and unemployment, and political instability, in a world much like in the 1930s? Not that that scenario must happen, but it can, given today's outlook, and history tends to repeat itself...

The Circle was an interesting idea wrapped in a really terrible book. Every page was full of terribly-paced plot development, one dimensional characters and cliched rip-offs of 1984.

The Circle is due to be released as a movie in April.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4287320

> Some may even consider it noble to optimize and perfect the world and its institutions (including commerce, via efficient advertising) using large-scale personal data.

Data they don't own. So I suppose, "noble" in the Robin Hood kind of way.

Also, "efficient" in what way? What metric do they optimize that lets advertising benefit society?

Seconded. I would gladly hand over my personal data if it means improved FB/search experience. I think there's a large number of people who share my viewpoint. If someone is concerned about protecting their online privacy they have the option of not using those services. (I know about trackers on third-party websites. It's pretty trivial to block them.)

mostly agreed. i would be okay of 1) the data never left facebook, 2) i had access to all the data, and 3) conversation content and contact data was specifically excluded.

So how do I prevent my friends from uploading my phone number when they share their contacts? What do I do when they take pictures at a party and upload them? Should I have to jump out of view every time somebody takes a phone out of their pocket? Give only "trusted people" my phone number?

You don't, and can't. Not beyond perhaps choosing better friends.

Information about you is not necessarily owned by you.

> Some may even consider it noble to optimize and perfect the world and its institutions (including commerce, via efficient advertising) using large-scale personal data.

That's all great, but how can I opt-out? Even without a facebook account, they are collecting my data.

yes it's always unethical. even more if you don't ask me or hide the fact that you're doing it. it's only acceptable if it is for public research.

lmao the mental olympics needed to arrive at the conclusion "data collection to improve advertising efficiency" is noble.

Reminds me of one of the recorded AOL customer service calls from someone trying to end service.

AOL: Hi, this is John at AOL. How may I help you today?

Ferrari: I want to cancel my account.

AOL: OK. I mean, is there a problem with the software itself?

Ferrari: No. I don't use it. I don't need it. I don't want it.

John disputes Ferrari's claim that he never uses the account.

AOL: Last year, last month it was 545 hours of usage.

Ferrari: I don't know how to make it any clearer. So I'm just gonna say it one last time. Cancel the account.

AOL: Well, explain to me what is wrong.

Ferrari: I'm not explaining anything to you. Cancel the account.

It goes on like this for 5 minutes.

Ferrari: Cancel my account. Cancel the account. Cancel the account.

From: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/13447232/ns/business-cnbc_tv/t/how...

IIRC, from the audio the AOL rep. just goes on about how he's "just there to help you". To me, this is the same. "We just want to give you the best advertising that is relevant to you!" So possibly these people just take them at face value. Which is usually a bad idea when there's a profit motive.

In the end, it all boils down to persons and personalities, and most important uglyness and shortcomings. Part of their surface pretends to think it's noble, their real self know how they are inside, they live with themselves 24/7, and they know it's the shriek of a ghoul scrambling away from the light. They want a glove to interact with the world, not because the world is dirty, but because they are, and cannot face themselves. So we will make them for them.

It may be good, but it's not democratic.

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