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Comment by wonton2 | Hacker News Reader

Thech giants never stole the web. Governments have just failed to regulate them or failed to see the power they get with their currently vast scale. They need laws and a set of ethical rules people will leave them for breaking.

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Big companies are the biggest fans of regulation. It raises the bar for entry and keeps those scrappy, pesky startups away.

Regulations dont have to be so heavy that you require consultants or a legal department. Regulation that protect the broad population from being exploited is neccessary everywhere. Just look at the crypto market compared to the more mature financial market. Issues with corporations manipulating the law makers is a separate problem.

What did Facebook do that should be illegal?

Already four years ago they ran experiments [1] on how to program your mood. They built an API to your emotions, and they started selling it, without you knowing it.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...

Are you proposing a law against trying to manipulate people's moods?

You mean a law against non-consensual psychological experiments? Yes.

Sounds dodgy. If I give you a free refill to see how you react, I go to jail?

That’s incredibly broad. Seems over the top.

Would this not outlaw the entire field of marketing and advertising? It's essentially entirely to cause an emotional reaction that bypasses your logical need centers to encourage you to purchase something.

Not the previous commenter, but many people have looked critically at marketing and media long enough to come to exactly this conclusion, myself included.

To my mind, there is something inherently wrong about the techniques used to sway opinion about products and services. They prey on our animalian reflexes and bypass the part of the brain even capable of consent. Marketing "should" (and I don't use that word often) be prohibited to use such tactics, and instead be an exposition of the product and service and any traceable, trustworthy qualifications bestowed upon it. Such a system is still hackable (selling awards for instance), but it's a way better alternative to marketing practices than what we have today.

I dislike advertising and I'd love to see marketing move from a "push" to a "pull" model, where consumers ask for information about products they want. It's not easy to see how we get there. Defending the right of consumers to block ads, and moving from ad-based funding to subscriptions could be a start. An outright ban on ads - I don't see how that could happen without overreaching to non-infringing speech.

This whole thread of comments seems constructed. The obvious answer to a obvously leading question ending in 3 (mine is the 4th) replies that basically disagrees with regulating advertisers. the first reply of the 3 belongs to one of the participants, but how and why would two more suddenly start participating in this thread many hours after the original post left the front page? It looks exactly like the strategy russia was using to manipulate social media conversations.

I can't comment about the other two posters, but I'm still waiting to hear how a law making it illegal to make inferences about people's behavior could possibly work. It sounds like the poster didn't think about the suggestion very carefully.

I think it should be illegal to require people to accept an agreement that enables facebook to sell their information to anyone. Not saying it is easy to do though. I guess that is part of what GDPR attempts to do in Europe. Intentions can be argued, but it is something.

When a User uses a Facebook app and the app developer gets not only a bunch of data about the User but also about everyone in the User's social graph, that should be illegal; the User's friends did not give consent.

But the user's friends did consent to have their data collected and sold when they joined the social networking site.

I agree, but that’s asking for informed customers which is kind of a joke.

Devils advocate, even us tech people don’t 100% understand the scope and reach of Facebook, what they are doing is unprecedented. It’s not like there could be really informed typical users.

Oh please. If that was reslly true, they wouldn’t have the ability to opt out.

Just so I understand, the suggestion is that collecting and profiting from user information be illegal? I'm not necessarily opposed to that but it's certainly radical. Might be easier to just stop using services that do this.

It’s not about profiting, it’s about handing over data to a third party without explicit consent. And yes, I am aware that’s how the credit companies like Equifax exist, they should not.

I see, so the problem is that the data sharing is opt-out instead of opt-in? This seems reasonable, although I'd be concerned about a law where J. Random Codemonkey puts up a free game on his website and gets prosecuted for selling the analytics data.

What does analytics data have to do with it? It is neither personal nor sensitive if it is a game. Why are you trying to compare this with a social media site that can sell your sexual orientation and all your friends location to anyone. The uses are not just limited to manipulating the masses, it could also be used by kriminals or foreign governments who are looking for weaknesses among public officials (for example through their families). Analytics from a game (or any small app) cannot tell you these things on a useful scale and granularity.

That depends on the game and how the site is implemented. It could very well collect or infer that data.

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