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Comment by jumelles | Hacker News Reader

Here we go again... it feel like there's no way to break out of this cycle where companies routinely go unpunished for bad behavior. Facebook, Equifax, Wells Fargo...

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The problem is that "bad behavior" is a concept in flux. Facebook never hid what their business model was: sell your personal data to third parties. Only a few privacy activists were concerned. Others reactions went from "meh" to "it's actually smart!" (Remember when Obama's campaign was praised for its innovative approach profiling voters?).

It took Cambridge Analytica for people to realize that they did not want this.

I have been paranoid about Facebook since day one, but there is something I won't do: blame them for coming up with a business model that is legal and did not seem to concern users ethically either.

The hearings of Zuckberg have been shameful. As much as I love seeing him on the grill, I have more contempt for the lawmakers in front of him, who actually enabled Facebook to become such a monster by either facilitating or simply not understanding what it was doing.

Facebook is a problem, but the ones responsible for this situation are not to be found within the company.

>I have more contempt for the lawmakers in front of him, who actually enabled Facebook to become such a monster by either facilitating or simply not understanding what it was doing.

Does your contempt extend to the billions of non-technical minded users who also did not understand what FB was doing?

Not really. The notion that the non-technical should understand EULAS dozens of pages long is a total fiction (that is legally binding in the US but not so much in saner countries).

On thousands of issues that can put several things I hold dear at risk, I just trust elected officials to do the right call. It is THEIR job to understand these issues and take the correct stance. I mean, this is literally what they are paid for.

I still wish that privacy had been a bigger concern to the population at large, but thanks to recent scandals, and to EU laws, this starts being the case.

>It is THEIR job to understand these issues and take the correct stance. I mean, this is literally what they are paid for.

Perhaps they are paid more by their donors to pass laws written by corporate lawyers

> The problem is that "bad behavior" is a concept in flux. Facebook never hid what their business model was: sell your personal data to third parties.

So not to interrupt the outrage mob here ... but facebook did not sell data to these companies. And actually I'm not aware of any case where people are outraged where facebook sold peoples data, including the Kogan case.

Sure: http://fortune.com/2018/03/20/facebook-congress-cambridge-an...

> Remember when Obama's campaign was praised for its innovative approach profiling voters?

Didn't Obama's campaign obtain users' consent before reading data?

Obama's campaign obtained users' consent before reading their friends' data. They did not, however, obtain the consent of those friends in any way, and at least for the 2012 campaign it was those friends who they were trying to convince to vote for Obama.

Hopefully some GDPR stick will help fix this

GDPR, the tool to prevent the disruption of Facebook from ever being economically viable! Yay. Let’s celebrate.

The assumption there being that Facebook continues to be economically viable...

Facebook disruption will be Facebook "spontaneously" ceasing operations, without replacement.

I bet on a quick shutdown, possibly with extradition shenanigans, offshore funds and other drama, after a criminal investigation or a whistleblower shines a light on potential liabilities.

If disruption of Facebook is economically viable because the new whatever-book is doing the same things to user privacy, then that's not useful anyway. It's not that important who is the largest provider, as long as the incentives are the way they are now, the largest provider will be doing harmful things. We need to establish appropriate incentives and boundaries (of which GDPR isn't perfect but certainly in the right direction) so that no matter if it's Facebook or someone else, their behavior is one that we can live with.

China just executes the CEO. Mindless ambition. Mindless consequences.

I hope you're not trying to say that's a better solution.

It probably is, given the type of characters proped up by the attention economy.

China hasn't produced a Trump yet. Meanwhile the US has laid the foundation with the attention economy (that props up people with the largest view/retweet/like count) to produce an entire crop of Trump type "leaders" in every sphere of life from the corporate world, to the army, to academia, to the media etc etc. The ground has been prepared and the seeds have been planted.

Look around. What is going to prevent their rise? Regulators? Zuckerberg?

So China has redefined CEO to mean: "Chief Executable Officer" :)

That is pretty good :) I can't find it right now, but some very similar phrase was used after the Deep Water Horizon explosion and oil spill, which caused the BP CEO to get fired, to describe the role of the leader in such situations.

"We're sorry!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4

This

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