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Comment by volak | Hacker News Reader

What's so bizarre to me about this whole ongoing story is the complete lack of perspective and common sense.

You give facebook all your information willingly and for free - and then people are surprised when facebook sells the information? Facebook's business is not to protect your information.. its to sell your information to advertisers. You're paying to use their platform to connect with your "friends" by giving up your rights to whatever they can scrape off your phone.

This is not a surprise.

Mr. Zuckerberg will appear before the panel and promise data-security changes but at the end of the day facebook is still a business for advertisers wanting your shopping lists, contacts, interests, and personal profile to sell you stuff. The only thing that will change will be facebook's vetting process so only "friendly" corporations like walmart and BP have access to everything Cambridge Analytica had.

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I think it's a surprise to many people in society. Weirdly, it's maybe even a surprise to tech-savvy people who knew about all this, but never bothered to really consider or act on the implications.

I do think that this is just how things work a lot of the time. The #metoo 'thing', or in particular the scandals about various people in Hollywood for example, were probably surprising to people outside the industry, despite the fact that they were frustratingly 'open secrets' inside it. And yet even inside the world of Hollywood many people never really considered the consequences of these 'open secrets' until the 'secret' part disappeared.

On a more personal note, I've experienced situations where, in hindsight, a particular person in my social world was obviously a horrible/dangerous individual (think rape/stalking). Somehow none of us either caught on to their malevolence, or kept finding ways to dismiss it until some situation proved how 'bad' they were.

After their 'true' nature became a public issue, for some this was truly a surprise, but probably for more of us than we'd be comfortable admitting, it wasn't all that surprising and we found ourselves struggling with the implications of 'let' things get so far without intervening.

>You're paying to use their platform to connect with your "friends" by giving up your rights to whatever they can scrape off your phone.

The general public (especially in developing countries) don't understand this at all.

In many countries facebook/messenger/whatsapp is unmetered thanks to facebook subsidies, which makes 'giving up your rights' the cheapest way (sometimes the only affordable way) to pay for a service to communicate with people.

Facebook is bundled with pretty much every Android phone ever.

People without facebook accounts have profiles, they're just not generally visible.

They've put a shitload of money and effort into forcing themselves into the position as a totally pervasive social arbitration platform, where the social cost of opting out makes it impossible even if you ignore the fact that your friends are probably still participating and happily handing over your data for you.

What's bizzarre is how people who do know these things still seem to expect 'perspective and common sense' from a totally uninterested and mostly uneducated public, and how people who do know these things can ignore just how creepy and predatory Facebooks practices are.

It's not facebook's fault people are uninterested and uneducated. Every company has one responsibility and one responsibility only - to make money for investors.

People who use facebook make a choice, consciously or not. They are all making a choice to sell their data in exchange for the platform.

Its not a hard sell - people sell a lot more for a lot less all the time.

Keep in mind this is not new. Companies like Sears, Walmart, Honeywell have customer data dating back 60 years. I've seen some of it. They never delete any of it - every credit card swipe, every zip code you've lived at, every product you've bought or returned.

This is the future. If you care about the uneducated or uninterested public then join a group educating people about the value of their data and what big business does with it.

Government will never be able to fix this.

> It's not facebook's fault people are uninterested and uneducated. Every company has one responsibility and one responsibility only - to make money for investors.

I 100% disagree with this statement. It's the equivalent of saying "A human has one responsibility and one responsibility only - stay alive" to hand-wave away criminal activity. Is BP not responsible for their oil spill in the Gulf because they still make money? Should pharmaceutical companies not have to put side effects on their product labels because the consumer should have educated themselves on how these chemicals affect your body?

I get that companies have been doing this for a long time and people should know this, but it hasn't been happening on this scale before, nor with the amount of computing power we have today to do some frankly frightening things.

The nuance you’re missing here is that advertisers can only ask Facebook to show to such and such from high level categories. Gay Male 18-35, San Francisco, into dogs, for example. That’s it. Facebook will then bill that advertiser based on how many people see that ad.

The advertiser has no idea who you are or even if they got your attention to the ad they just paid for.

My only point is - your entire statement is basically "trust facebook" - no one should trust facebook. Personal information is the product facebook sells - it should surprise no one when that data is sold.

That's only true until someone clicks on the ad. Then the advertiser gets to put a cookie in that browser that says "the ad Facebook only shows to gay 18-35 SF dog owners got clicked in this browser."

Facebook collects a lot of data about you that you don't give it. It tracks you across the web using "like" buttons, and cookies from comment sections even if you don't leave comments. It collects your contact info from your friends' phones.

If that is true, and there is no way for Facebook to survive AND give users more control over what, how, and when their data is shared then they may actually be in trouble.

True - 100%

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