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Comment by sandov | Hacker News Reader

As shitty as Facebook is as a service, I don't think they should have any legal obligation to 'protect' users from their own neglect.

I don't use facebook, because I think a free-software based & decentralized social network would be the right way to do social networking, but if the rest of the people want to give away their info, fine by me.

If someone I know wants to give my info to fb, it's fine too, but he/she loses part of my trust.

I value the freedom to do whatever you want with the data you have more than the convenience of the government protecting whatever data I foolishly gave away to someone.

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There's a point where "everyone for themselves!" doesn't quite cut it. The most obvious example is probably fraud. You could argue everyone must check whether a deal they get involved with is legit and accept the risks of being screwed. But that's not how it works since we must enforce a basic level of trust by law for society to function. A slightly less obvious but still rather well known example is addiction (drugs, gambling, etc).

The reason we elect politicians rather than deciding how to deal with big, social issues like that ourselves is because it's a full time job. Most people don't have the time and have no obligation to research "free-software based & decentralized social networks". They don't know about it and don't have the time or education to even know there's alternatives. We're so cynical about politics that it's hard to even trust politics to solve any of this since it's all so backwards and corrupt but I believe, because of the sheer impact it has on society, this is a political problem and needs to be solved through actual laws.

> The reason we elect politicians rather than deciding how to deal with big, social issues like that ourselves is because it's a full time job.

I agree that being a politician is a full time job, but it's not the job you appear to think it is. The job of a politician is to get reelected. Any good the politician happens to do is a side effect that you can't count on happening again.

It's the ideal job we're electing them to fulfill, our broken election system makes this very much not their job, but the statement is correct in theory.

> It's the ideal job we're electing them to fulfill

But we don't elect ideal politicians, we elect real ones. There has never been any such thing as a political system where the "ideal job" actually existed, and I don't see any prospect of such a system ever existing. So the specifications of the "ideal job" are irrelevant; we need to look at the real jobs that real politicians actually do.

This sounds awfully close to the "why would I care about surveillance, I'm not doing anything wrong" argument. The reason it's important for Facebook to be legally required to protect user data is because you have no choice in being part of that data. You, as an individual, can do quite a bit, but you can't prevent people from sharing their contact books, pictures, and location. With the ubiquity of Facebook, everyone has some sort of footprint on the site.

If the data is valuable and worthy of protection, and you have no ability to provide that protection, then it is reasonable for protection to be required from the layer that is removing the individual's agency.

You make it sound like the users aren't even on the Facebook site. Remember that the 'users' are using a Facebook service, a consumer product provided by Facebook. They are responsible for what the product is, and does, regardless of what the users think.

No, in this case they are not.

Do we need to keep reminding people that even if you never created an account, you have a facebook user associated with your real life identity.

> I don't use facebook, because I think a free-software based & decentralized social network would be the right way to do social networking, but if the rest of the people want to give away their info, fine by me.

I don't see how a decentralized and free social network wouldn't have any privacy issues. As long as you are putting your information online, it's ripe for attacks. If you have a friend in your decentralized network that uses a malicious app, that app now has access to his/her friends list and thus your information. CA got a ton of data even from users who didn't take their quiz, but rather through friends of people who took the quiz.

The best social network, IMO, is the one you have IRL.

> I don't think they should have any legal obligation to 'protect' users

They do have legal obligations if they're going to sell political ads.

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