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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

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RcouF1uZ4gsC

There are many shady tech company practices:

* Open sexual harassment culture

* Building spy software for the government

* Selling censorship tools to governments

* Selling your private data to advertisers

* Allowing advertisers to target a person's emotional state

* Profiting off of fake news and click bait

* Tracking people across the web

* Using monopolies to limit competition in other realms

* Strong arming third parties to keep them from using your competitors' products

Somehow, limiting streaming to 720p on non-supported platforms seems pretty benign.

Edit: Tried to separate list from closing comment.

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Could you re-phrase this somehow? I'm not sure if you are talking about companies in general or Netflix.

Edit: I rather ask than make an assumption. Thanks for the confirmation.

His last sentence should make it clear that he wasnt talking about netflix, shouldnt it?

Strongly assume parent was referring to all those things that are done at other companies... vs the 720p issue at Netflix.

On the other hand, if Netflix has managed to reimplement the NSA's dragnet internally, I'm going to be really impressed by their engineers' productivity.

From the second to second-last line, they're referring to shady practices in general. In their last, they're arguing that delivering lower-quality streams to Linux-based user agents is comparatively benign.

Not sure I agree, FWIW.

You have sources for these?

I totally understand the need for sources in informed discussions, but I also feel like these topics have been so well documented that they have reached a point where asking someone for a source every time they throw out the fact that companies are "Tracking people across the web" is a contrived roadblock at best, and purposely stifling to discussion at worst.

With that said, I don't want to just single you out since this is a common practice, so I went ahead and found sources for you:

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/technology/uber-workplace... [1]https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palanti... [2]https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/selling-china-surveill... [3]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/for-sale-your-pr... [4]http://mashable.com/2017/04/30/facebook-leaked-report-advert... [5]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11... [6]https://www.technologyreview.com/s/530741/the-murky-world-of... [7]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor.... [8]https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160920/07021035568/hp-la...

I somewhat agree, however in I don't think the parent should have been down voted. If someone doesn't regularly follow tech news then it is completely reasonable for them to have never heard of any of these incidents. In addition, the original comment was ambiguously worded as to whether he/she was talking about Netflix or acts done at other companies.

True, but in this case you could type "tech {text of bullet point}" into google and in every single instance save one, the first link returned would've been a source of the info.

Asking for a source makes sense for controversial, or hard to find information. Not when it's so commonly reported that it's the first link on google on every single topic.

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