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Comment by bitcharmer | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those things that make me very pessimistic about the future of our civilisation.

Instead of empowering common folk and accelerating our potential as a species what is happening is our thoughts, interests, fears, relationships and most intimate secrets gradually become a commodity in the hands of a few powerful companies.

The trend is clear and I am really fearful for my children's future.

It's really depressing to watch the world change into something many of mankind's greatest thinkers feared the most.

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It is extremely depressing seeing the likes of Google, Facebook, Microsoft etc have already headed down this direction.

Over my 20 or so years in IT, it's devolved into scummy rent-seeking and a consumer hostile VC hot mess.

There has not been a bigger sellout in history than the tech community. What makes it insufferable is the posturing and hypocrisy.

Companies like Google and facebook continue to be glorified inspite of their creepy obsession with stalking everyone 24/7 and legitimizing surveillance.

If privacy laws worked it would not come to this. Without regulations depending on goodwill and ethics in the face of greed has never worked. It just leads to a self serving clique who will handwave and legitimize anything for profit.

What does "empowering common folk" look like?

How does one even build a workable definition of "common" without aggregating data somewhere to build averages?

Parent probably meant e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth

Yeah, but whose fault is it? Big companies offering these abusive services or the common folk's who agree to use these services without giving a fuck about their personal information?

That's not a new question:

* whose fault is it? Tobacco manufacturers' for making products which cause cancer, or the common folk's for agreeing to smoke cigarettes without "giving a fuck" about their health?

* whose fault is it? Pharma companies' for making drugs with terrible side-effects, or the common folk's for taking those drugs without "giving a fuck" about their health?

There are many examples, but in all of them the government stepped in and stopped the abuse of the big companies, just like it must do for Google, Facebook & co which take advantage of the common folk's inability to understand the very complex mechanisms those companies designed to deceive them.

Pretty simple.

Pharma companies don't intentionally make medicine which cause side effects. It just happens to be hard to design medicines that don't given the complexity of biological systems. I don't see how this claim is relevant to whatever point you're making.

I like the analogy here. I'd love to see this handled in exactly the same way that governments handle smoking, with huge tax penalties and government health warnings all over apps that abuse your data.

Most people think they are in control and don't realize how much personal information they're giving away. They know facebook has their posts but they don't realize facebook knows every site they visit that has a like button. The fact that this is even possible is because your browser developer doesn't care about your privacy.

Then there is the issue that they don't realize what companies can do with their data. They thinks it's all relatively innocent and don't realize it can be used for things like price discrimination.

So users might be partly responsible, but big tech is still doing a lot of un-consented to tracking.

The companies fault, definitely.

It is unrealistic to assume that the average person is going to know everything they need to to protect themselves against such a company, especially when they have billions in revenue and armies of lawyers to weasel their way through the spirit of the law.

Protecting the consumer comes in the form of regulation and precautionary principle. Regulate the ever-loving shit out of companies like Google in my opinion.

Publicly traded companies may have a responisibility to their shareholders, but they also have a responsibility to society, which I consider much more important.

That's one of the reasons my children don't exist.

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