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Comment by dbasedweeb | Hacker News Reader

Is it really so hard to believe that people are all out of trust and goodwill at this point? It’s like having a classroom full of toddlers who all play with matches, and every few weeks they burn the whole school down. Finally the teachers makes rule: no one gets to play with matches. A couple of kids say they’re very responsible and never set fire to anything.

Nobody cares.

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I could say the same thing in reverse about regulations. Every few weeks some regulation ruins the internet even more and finally people are sick of the regulations.

Name one way your life was ever negatively impacted, in a concrete way and not just in your head, by companies using your data to create value in the form of targeted ads and such to keep websites free. I'm waiting.

I suppose you don't count strangers having my personal data as "concrete"?

But I can't think of any internet regulation that's ever harmed me. Which ones are you talking about?

Edit: I can think of a small number of regulations (much less than one per year) that cause problems, but they still don't meet the personal concrete harm threshold you've proposed.

Equifax breach and stolen identities? Cambridge Analytica and the 2016 US Presidential election? Ashley Madison and affairs being revealed?

We can go back and forth about the best way to deal with this, but it's crazy to think that this systemic gobbling up of personal data doesn't have real consequences.

I don't see it as fair to say those are consequences of the companies being allowed to have the data in the first place. They're consequences of poor security. We don't blame spam on email or food poisoning on food, do we? A GDPR-like approach to solving spam would be outlawing all automated or business-related use of email.

Why do the rest of HN users have to educate you about the abuses perpetrated by various companies?

Facebook famously did an emotion manipulation experiment on 500k randomly selected users.

There's a trial now alleging that Facebook used profile data to discriminate against older programmers in job postings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17178565

Many types of abuses are subtle and remain unknown for the victims.

>Why do the rest of HN users have to educate you about the abuses perpetrated by various companies?

Burden of proof lies on the one making the claim.

>Facebook famously did an emotion manipulation experiment on 500k randomly selected users.

I don't really find that abusive or ethically troubling.

>There's a trial now alleging that Facebook used profile data to discriminate against older programmers in job postings:

Maybe this age discrimination, which was already illegal on its own, wouldn't have been possible to commit if the data didn't exist in the first place. That doesn't mean it's the tool's fault or that the tool should be illegal.

Burden of proof lies on the one making the claim.

I didn’t make a claim, you did, then flipped it around and made one for me. ;)

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