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Comment by bitofhope | Hacker News Reader

Those are good points, but the post does come across as a little apologetic. Serving the paying customers should not absolve you from responsibility for the data collecting.

Reductio ad absurdum: a hitman's job is not to be concerned with the well-being of their targets, but to serve the paying client. This doesn't make killing people for money not evil, because the business model is inherently unethical.

Facebook is not non-evil for collecting user data to target their customers' ads. I think the entire foundation for their business is unethical.

I agree with the points of the article, save for #7, but I think it's unfortunate Facebook doesn't have to take more responsibility for the data collecting they have pioneered and continue to do.

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Agree. I'm living in Europe and there are people who value their privacy and talk about it loudly. I don't expect that global companies hinder their growth without regulation forcing it. That's the reason we fight for our right for privacy and use the only language they understand: financial penalties.

Murder is illegal here. Now we do the same with privacy. We're in power, not them. It's not the job of the hitman to be ethical (although it would be nice). It's the job of our society to fight for our values.

I think the issue is that Facebook, unlike a hitman, is providing a service to the user, the user just isn't paying for that service.

The service is essentially public, like education, health, and roads. We would benefit if it could be managed and paid for publicly.

The only issue is that Facebook's scope is transnational, so you can't solve this locally or nationally. The same argument probably applies to similar platforms that facilitate "public discourse."

Perhaps something under the UN umbrella will eventually emerge to fill this vacant space—not unlike how nation-states nationalised railways in the nineteenth century?

>The service is essentially public, like education, health, and roads.

Could not disagree more. I am not a Facebook user. While I have benefited much from education, health, and roads, and would stand to lose a lot were they not present even if I chose not to use those services. As a non-Facebook user, my life has not been negatively impacted by not using it, nor has it been positively impacted by other's using it.

The value of this service is so low that I would absolutely be opposed to the state getting involved in providing Facebook alternatives, and would really not want my taxes going towards it. Let those who value it pay for it (whether financially or through their data).

Not to challenge your distaste, but insofar as more among us use it to talk about and organise around public issues, it is a de facto public space and has a public utility.

Just to give a micro example, last month parents at my kids' primary school used a Facebook group to challenge (albeit unsuccessfully) top-down changes in the school's governance. I'm talking about that kind of thing, not holiday photos.

Interesting example. Railways in my country are State-managed and I don't find them a good service at all. Are yours?

Your state is possibly mismanaged!

Fun fact: the current Secretary-General of the UN is an ex-PM of my country.

Care to reassess your proposal? :)

> I think the entire foundation for their business is unethical.

Then much of modern business is unethical. What facebook is doing isn't very different from what newspapers do, what tv networks do and what much of tech does.

What do you think ABC, NBC, CBS, etc does? What do you think nytimes, washingtonpost, npr, etc does? What do you think google/youtube does? Even NPR sells "ads" to their corporate sponsors for "donations".

> for the data collecting they have pioneered and continue to do.

You are giving facebook far too much credit. They didn't pioneer anything. They are just the best at it. The business model that facebook excels in certainly predates its existence ( google did it before facebook ) and on a broader scale, predates facebook by decades.

The point should be that facebook should be forced to simply state what they are doing and collecting to each new user and the user should decide whether they want to use facebook's services or not.

> Then much of modern business is unethical.

Well... yeah.

I think they meant that the business model of a hitman specifically, because of, y'know, the killing.

So, the reductio would be demonstrating that the "who pays isn't the same as who 'receives' the thing" isn't a sufficient defense in every case.

When I read a newspaper or tune into a radio station they are in no way harvesting my personal information.

What if you visit their websites?

In comparing Facebook to newspapers and others scale matters. When you have an addicting service at the scale of Facebook that also has the ability to sway elections or public opinion at the scale they do then it becomes a problem. Requiring disclosure from Facebook is not enough. They need to be heavily regulated.

Yes, I do think tracking users in the way that is commonplace nowadays is absolutely an ethical issue and I deem it wrong despite its wide spread.

I can buy a newspaper (at least one that still exists in printed form) and read it without being tracked by an invasive marketing machine. Advertisement is not the problem, it's the user tracking. I'd rather Facebook, and yes — Google, ABC, NBC, CBS, WaPo, NPR and so many others go bankrupt than continue on business model that is based on violating the readers' privacy.

Being the best at data collection is pioneering in my book, because it means they are doing it more effectively or at bigger scale than people before them. I am not trying to imply that it's ok for non-Facebook entities to do that, either. Google's data harvesting is absolutely as much of a problem. I referred to Facebook specifically because the parent's linked post did.

>Reductio ad absurdum: a hitman's job is not to be concerned with the well-being of their targets, but to serve the paying client. This doesn't make killing people for money not evil, because the business model is inherently unethical.

There should be a Latin phrase for absurd analogies. The obvious difference between your scenario and the Facebook one is that the victim is an unwilling participant.

>Facebook is not non-evil for collecting user data to target their customers' ads. I think the entire foundation for their business is unethical.

On this you will find a reasonable split between those who agree and those who don't. It is not obvious that it is unethical.

Personally, I have no problem with them using the data to serve targeted ads. If I were to broaden it out, I do have ethical concerns about merely collecting that much data on a person and saving it. But my concerns are for use cases much worse than advertising.

>The obvious difference between your scenario and the Facebook one is that the victim is an unwilling participant.

There are numerous obvious differences involved that make comparison between user tracking and hired murder absurd. The reductio merely pointed out that the defence, that the victims are not the customer, does not excuse what is being done. This is laughably obvious in the case of hired killers and comparable in the case of user tracking. Any other similarities were not implied.

Also, I largely question the ability of a large part of the user base to give informed consent on the case. The extent and implications of the user tracking done by Facebook (and other parties) are byzantine and difficult to grasp for me, a nerd with interest in privacy issues. I do not expect the general public to have a deeper understanding. Even then, Facebook has been known to track people without user accounts. That doesn't count as willing participants as far as I'm concerned.

>On this you will find a reasonable split between those who agree and those who don't. It is not obvious that it is unethical.

I will and it is not. I hold an opinion shared by many, but I am under no delusion that it's uncontroversial.

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