Comment by IAmEveryone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IAmEveryone | Hacker News Reader

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This libertarian utopia obviously breaks down any time you're presented with a 200-page Terms of Service. Nobody has the time and/or skills to read and understand the content at the level required for "informed consent".

Which is why societies have come up with a far better method: collectively decide (or collectively choose people to decide) on reasonable limits for certain types of transactions.

My German law professor used to say that she never read ToS. Because under the country's law, they are either reasonable or unenforceable.

Such laws have nothing to with censorship. If you really need your users private messages, you just have to more explicitly present them with the choice, and respect their decision to say no without unreasonably denying them service.

The US has far more lenient standards for such one-sided contracts, but the basic principle is obviously the same: If Facebook were to add a paragraph giving them ownership of your house somewhere deep in the ToS, they wouldn't stand a chance in a court of law.

You don't need to read a 200-page ToS or live in a libertarian utopia to know what data they have access to and to assume they'll abuse it. A few quick examples:

Don't use Facebook - it's basically a tool for turning any little aspect of your social network into ad revenue. Communicate directly with people you actually value and fuck the rest of 'em.

Don't use Dropbox, their employees have access to all your data, so does someone who breaks in. Encrypt your data before it hits the internet or forget about it.

Don't use a paid VPN service for anonymity, they have your billing data and connecting IP directly and you have no way to verify if they "don't log". Don't trust them. Use an anonymity network which tries its damnedest using technical means to mask those sorts of details.

If you give someone else your data, think not what they can legally do with it, but what they can technically do with it. Write laws all you want, Facebook will still abuse your data to the maximum, attackers will still get access to far too much data, it doesn't help. Personal responsibility is the final solution to the problem. When you give someone data, always assume the worst. Computers have an amusing tendency to tend to make technical feasibility into reality.

I’m always amazed by the ability of libertarians to believe that in the jungle, they’d be tigers rather than tiger shit. More often it turns out they just have a grossly inflated opinion of themselves, as in this case. We’re all human, all weak, and we all need to depend on each other a lot, it’s just the way it is.

I think that people who go out of their way to present what they believe are alpha male characteristics are essentially hanging a neon sign above themselves. That sign is begging for someone with those characteristics to come along and fix the worlds problems in the way that the stereotypical Clint Eastwood or Arnold Schwarzenegger character solved his problems. In other words, an alpha male exerting his will, delivering satisfying one liners, and saving the world.

Why else would nearly every single popular conservative media "character" be so uncannily similar? Why did nearly all of those characters triple down on this machismo roughly 18 months ago? Could it be that they got back the results of their latest A/B test?

I think this all drives at the most interesting, world changing possibility that could come out of this reckoning with Facebook. What will happen when it becomes conventional wisdom that the true power of collecting all of this data is not the ability to predict what you will do, but the ability to direct what you will do? What will happen when it truly registers with people that this necessarily removes their agency? What will prevent that critical mass from making the trivial jump in logic that advertisers and public relations firms have been progressively improving on these same skills to the same general ends for a century?

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