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Comment by d1zzy | Hacker News Reader

Let's not get hyperbolic and compare data mining to murder.

If you think it's not OK that's your opinion, but do a survey among regular folk of "is it OK to have web sites mine your data to provide you with targeted ads and free services like search, maps, email or you wish to pay $5 a month" and see the results. Make sure to include there people from all walks of life and age and all over the world.

Personally I like having choices. Data mining should be just another mechanism to pay for the services provided. I know for a fact that if these companies didn't have "data mining" as a mechanism to provide otherwise free services I would have never used those free services for the past 15 years or so, growing up in a country where electronic payments were available much later and the per capita yearly income was super low.

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The problem here is that we don't have choices. Usually it's "accept our data mining or don't use our service". And since a lot of tech companies operate walled garden monopolies these days, that is not, in actuality, a choice.

If someone was pushing a law that required all companies implementing data mining/tracking to have a paid version that could not exceed the value they gain from that tracking, I'd be fine with that. I assume it'd be pennies in most cases considering your Facebook account is really only worth like $12 a year to Facebook.

"accept our data mining or don't use our service"

The internet is and has historically been based on fundamentally voluntary actions, quite literally an extension of speech.

Before this law, it was easier to create competitors. What do you consider a "walled garden monopoly"?

> I assume it'd be pennies in most cases considering your Facebook account is really only worth like $12 a year to Facebook.

Facebook quarterly ARPU was USD$26.76 for US/Canada and USD$8.86 in Europe in Q4 2017. I'm also guessing that people willing to pay for Facebook are more likely to be a high value demographic, and would conversely need to pay more than the average user for that region.

It would presumably need to be illegal to price people based on their willingness to pay for the service.

> $12 a year to Facebook

If there was enough demand for this it would already exist.

Despite the amount of noise of complaints, most people are actually very willing to have some of their information used in exchange for all of the free services they get in return.

Most users are just going to accept the terms and move on. Just as they have already done in the past with EULA's. If this does happen, then essentially users are saying they are already happy enough with the choice they have.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/17/facebook-gdpr-changes/

Let's not get hyperbolic and compare data mining to murder.

What, in your opinion, is the correct number of disclaimers before one is allowed to respond, "duh, I already covered that"? Besides, organized crime involves a much broader set of actions than just killing people. Traditionally it has included such mundane activities as trash collection. Nothing wrong with collecting the trash that people leave at the curb, right?

Regardless, it's tech companies jumping on the hype (derived from the word "hyperbolic") train to tell us of the woes that will befall us should such a thing pass. The world hasn't yet come to an end with the passage of GDPR, I doubt it will should this regulation go through.

Just because we don't take the side of what the tech companies tell us (which obviously will try to portray it negatively, it's in their interest to do so) doesn't mean that we think GDPR or similar laws are perfect either. I think the true effects of GDPR will take 5-10 years to develop and we'll see then if it was a good idea. I'm just glad I grew up in a world where I had easy free access to very powerful online tools because I cannot say if the same will be true in the future.

Did you really just complain that the analogy was hyperbolic 10 seconds after reading that the analogy was hyperbolic? Everybody here knows already.

> Personally I like having choices.

And that's exactly the point of GDPR. To give consumers a choice.

The point of the GDPR, as I understood it, is to protect the privacy of users. It does this by limiting users to services that fall within the constraints defined by the regulation. In this sense, your own preferences and will have no meaning, as the GDPR attempts to achieve its goal, in part, by limiting your choices.

Following this rationale, one would also argue that requiring companies to use plain English in privacy policies is a constraint on the end-user's freedom.

If the regulation in effect forbade anyone from using a service that did not do that, then yes, it very clearly would be. That doesn't mean the two (the GDPR and a fictional law that did just what you said) were equally prohibitive, in case that was the implication.

But I take your point, since I never mentioned anything about degrees of prohibitiveness.

Under GDPR you can choose to share your personal details for data mining or choose not to. Previously the choice was entirely owned by the company

> "is it OK to have web sites mine your data to provide you with targeted ads and free services like search, maps, email or you wish to pay $5 a month" and see the results.

But is it right to let companies track users simply because the users say it's ok?

To put it another way: I think the EU would be right to consider it's citizens not as adults that are able to make decisions on integrity or privacy.

> But is it right to let companies track users simply because the users say it's ok?

Yes. Are we not free individuals capable of consent?

> I think the EU would be right to consider it's citizens not as adults that are able to make decisions on integrity or privacy.

I find this paternalistic, authoritarian attitude to be immoral. Sad to see the ideas of the Enlightenment, of Locke and the founding fathers, so casually discarded.

Selling your body for money and buying crack with it could be a choice by a free, consenting individual, but society has decided both the prostitution and the crack are choices too corrosive to society to be allowed. The individual is not held sacrosanct, especially when he/she acts against the group.

What remains to be decided here is whether the collection of data by "surveillance capitalists" is corrosive enough to society to be forbidden or restricted as well.

banning prostitution and the drug war have both proven to be counterproductive.

> The individual is not held sacrosanct,

By you perhaps, but those are the principles of the Enlightenment and modern western society and have served us far better than collectivism.

> especially when he/she acts against the group.

Right, sharing my data with another individual or company isn't "acting against the group" or even involving the group.

> What remains to be decided here is whether the collection of data by "surveillance capitalists" is corrosive enough to society to be forbidden or restricted as well.

Not if you respect individual, natural rights. Furthermore, scientific/medical research, traffic prediction, spam detection, self-driving all are arising out of voluntary submission of data by free individuals. I don't see any sense in hindering innocent, positive efforts out of a desire for retribution against "surveillance capitalists" based on the "guilty until proven innocent" model of preemptive regulation. Thankfully the principles of individual, natural rights have been codified into the US Constitution to a large degree.

I spoke very plainly. Banning prostitution and drugs were decisions made by a society, to restrict individuals. How productive they were, you can talk about with someone who wants to change the subject to that. The point was only that those restrictions were made. It happened. Same with myriad others. "The individual" was not held, by those people who enacted those laws, or by the majority of people who voted for those people, to be above the rule of law.

Nor was the individual held to be above the rule of law in Enlightenment thought. The law was thought to be made by individuals acting collectively (a departure from having a single individual, i.e. monarch, doing it), so if anything the Enlightenment introduced the "collectivism" by pushing lawmaking down into a demographic that was much more populous. What do you think voting in a constitutional convention is? Individuals collectivizing! Just like Soviet farmers!!!!! Oh no!

> "The individual" was not held, by those people who enacted those laws, or by the majority of people who voted for those people, to be above the rule of law.

Correct. And had individual rights been upheld we could have avoided the costly lessons and lives destroyed by those rights-trampling laws.

> Nor was the individual held to be above the rule of law in Enlightenment thought.

The theory of natural rights, which was central to the Enlightenment, held that the laws and governments were formed only to secure individual rights and could not be made to supersede them. A constitutional convention is voting on how to best uphold and respect those rights, not overrule them.

'Society' has decided? That's one view. I gather prostitution is legal in Argentina, Austria, Armenia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, El Salvador, Finland, France, Greece, Guatemala, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru, Portugal, Senegal, Slovakia, Switzerland and Turkey, Belize, Colombia, Costa Rica, Honduras, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Panama, Paraguay, the United Kingdom, Uruguay and Venezuela.

I was taking American/Californian society as the default, but yes, those are societies that have decided differently. Wow! Lightbulb?

If we're making tedious lists, don't forget the US state of Nevada. But my point wasn't about prostitution and I wasn't trying to change the subject to prostitution; apparently you find the topic too distracting. What about crack? Not a word about crack?

In a lot of these countries you listed, prostitution is technically legal but paying for sex is illegal. Which makes prostitution de facto illegal.

> the United Kingdom

In England it's illegal to

induce someone to become a prostitute

solicit in a public place

kerb crawl

run a brothel

earn money from someone else being a prostitute

have sex with someone who's been forced into prostitution even if you didn't know

have sex with someone who's been trafficed, even if you didn't know (and trafficing includes being transported around England, not just into England).

So, yes, two people exhanging money for sex is legal, but actually carrying out that arrangement is difficult.

The regular folk have no idea what "mine your data" actually means: very few people outside the advertising technology industry really understands how their data is processed, shared and monetized.

The profit of the organized crime does not come from murders. Trafficking, racket, large scale fraud are the means of a criminal enterprise.

Let’s not start giving false choices.

I simply don’t believe your assertion that the choice is between free services or paying a monthly fee.

Like I said, I like choices. I never said that those are the _only_ 2 choices, but they are 2 choices. And one of them was easily available and made it possible to use those services wherever I was, no matter how much money I had or how old I was.

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