Comment by krick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by krick | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

2. would we an extremely bad law. Even if purely "social" factors will be worked out and we come up with a perfect definition of when and how this should apply — how the fuck do you mean to enforce it? It will make only more trouble and bureaucracy for tech people (I mean actual programmers) with no useful output. Because you cannot realistically enforce it. Data either belongs to somebody, or it doesn't. Either you come up with technological solution for keeping user data secure from anybody including youself (which would be equivalent to not storing it at all, and I'm not sure it's possible for every application), or you make it responsibility of some shady but "reputable" auditors to make sure there's no crime going on, which is a dead end, as even if there's no bribes and conspiracy (which there sure will be), it only passes the responsibility and assumes the end user "trusts" the regulator, the government — well, just "someone else". Which is just silly.

Same applies to 3. at some extent. Only 1. may be assumed reasonably (even though still not "easily", as in practice it will just produce more work for lawyers and accountants) transparent for the public.

The original comment said:

"[...] with strong guarantees that the data of end user who has opted for paid service is kept private and not monetized anyhow."

As an "actual programmer" myself, I don't see how that would be so burdensome to implement. The data is somehow segregated so that it's excluded from being sold to advertisers in any form. The user can have their data deleted permanently at any time.

It obviously wouldn't prevent someone from authorizing a 3rd party app to all of my Facebook data, but that is more about Facebook educating people about what they're consenting to rather than a philosophical debate about ownership of data.

> As an "actual programmer" myself, I don't see how that would be so burdensome to implement

Oh, but you will see, when your manager (who doesn't really understand the implications of various technical decisions, by the way) will order you to do something completely meaningless (in your opinion), because the regulatory documents (made by people who understand and care for the implications of technical decisions far, far less than your manager) say something meaningless, contradictory and hard to interpret in the first place. If you aren't familiar with such situation it's probably because you are not working in a regulated industry, not because these things "solve themselves" in practice. No, in practice they don't.

> The data is somehow segregated so that it's excluded from being sold to advertisers in any form.

That doesn't mix with there being free users whose data is sold to advertisers, because it's the same data. You share your photo with another user who in turn shares it with another user etc. That's what a social network is.

So what happens when the vast majority of everything is shared with both types of users? If touching a free user means it can be subject to facial recognition and tagging and everything else for advertising then there is little point in paying. If touching a paid user means it can't then it destroys the revenue model for free users and the price of paying would be high enough to discourage everyone from doing it, because you're de facto paying for all the free users you share anything with.

I'm not sure what you consider as "no useful output"? Is it the offering your services for a fee instead of ads or guaranteeing the privacy of your users' data?

Because to me, both are quite useful outputs. The first one is quite common practice, and for the second one there are other industries (e.g. financial, medical) from where we can see how this is actually already done in legislation and practice.

(I would think that majority of Google's and Facebook's technical challenges are because they want to utilize the customer data.)

There are tons of rules that are not immediately enforceable, but are still in place and make the society better. Make it illegal, find and punish people who don't follow the rules, and things will be better. Many people are not willing to do outrightly illegal stuff.

That's a curious opinion and I still am too see the facts to back it up with, perhaps you can provide it. Because, as a matter of fact, I've seen exactly the opposite: laws that are not enforceable are the worst laws ever, disasterous even. If they are not "important" in their consequences, they just leave the simple folks (small businesses, for example — and hurting small business is really unwise thing to do IMO) in the state of FUD, because it takes a professional cons-man (e.g. and experienced lawyer) to know how to deal with this bullshit — it puts "honest" people in uncomfortable position, while doing nothing to people who are used to operating in perpetual state of moral hazard, which means it is beneficial to people who are most likely to exploit the law (or its absence) to start with. If this law is more "important" and involves a lot of regulations it fuels corruption, because, again, it's beneficial for dishonest people — it's up to somebody's opinion if you are breaking the law, and opinions can be swayed with some money…

In the most general and seemingly "harmless" case these laws do exactly nothing: nobody is following them and nobody tries to punish people for not following them. This just makes the legal system more complicated (and — yes, there are plenty of such laws, and this is one of the reasons so many legal systems are shit) and provokes the disrespectful, hand-waving attitude towards the law, which isn't a good thing either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com