Box CEO says mistrust of Google and Facebook could spread | Hacker News Reader

Box CEO says mistrust of Google and Facebook could spread

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54 pointsthrowaway204814 comments

At the bottom of all this seems to be the question: can any company practicing surveillance as a business model be trusted?

And if not, what do we do about this business model? Can it be reformed, or should we just kill it off?

It’s doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere on it’s own.

Selling out your users has never been a successful long term business model. These companies should have held up paid models and not bowed to pressure for free services (at the hidden cost of selling all our data). They should all be replaced by companies that charge a reasonable fee (or are subsidised) for the service provided like every other industry.

But a "free" competitor could then have appeared, and would almost certainly have experienced greater user growth compared to a paid alternative. The number of users is one of the crucial metrics of success.

As well it should. Can you name a company that you trust?

Apple. But for a different reason than you might think.

They’ve now made so many promises about privacy that if they renew on those promises (ie such that they were lying), then their will be shareholder and other lawsuits till the end of time. Tim Cook would be in court for a decade.

Pretty darn good incentive to keep to their path.

Is it recent that shareholder lawsuits started serving this purpose of cryptic and costly checks and balances?

Might this arrangement only exist because the Apple brand depends on a level of dignificafion somewhere above Surveillance State Overlord?

It’s not nearly as comforting for me as it seems to be for you, but I guess it’s a decent point in this situation.

The rule that allows class actions has been in place since 1966, but has taken different meanings (due to both changes in the law and court interpretations) since that time.

In the case of a misleading material statement (which this type of case would fall under) legal remedies go back to the Securities Act of 1933, which prohibit such statements. [0]

I agree, it's not the most comforting, and worse, it would be a long, protracted battle that could easily last the better part of a decade. My gut feel is that such an event would be brutal on management and the stock price for years, so any rational manager would do everything they could to avoid that situation.

[0] - IANAL, but I do work as a licensed practitioner in the securities industry.

Right. And I don’t trust the author has such a poor understanding of this topic as he claims. Trust in the traditional sense is a very expensive operation. If delivered on the level of a local storefront small business, for example, it might be worth asking whether the result of corporate practice justifies it’s own means. In this statement, I might be discounting the innovation allowed by organizations of such power and scale, or maybe not. That’s a separate conversation.

I have worked on numerous advertising campaigns focused on “building consumer trust” in the client. That’s what they called it, anyways. There is no shortage of literature and other media on what this involves. See https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s for starters.

Public relations does not build trust. It steals trust.

Our commercial enterprises are in a deep debt of trust to their own society. But, the truly sad part is how much further we can go before we bottom out. Advertising steals trust much like how finance steals capital, but the absence of numbers makes the damage even more difficult to count.

My inference is that trust is sectarian. In America people trust the politicians in their own political party almost implicitly. We trust our own family and social groups. When presented with an outsider we often mistrust them to some degree, at least initially.

Companies that wish to appeal to broad demographics can't play this game because they can't pick sides. The companies that do pick a niche, i.e. a torrent website that advocates a free and open internet, crypto, whatever, can gain a strong following but pays a steep price in the process.

Facebook and Google can never be trustworthy companies because they must appeal to advertisers and consumers at the same time.

Interesting and well said.

The thing about how Facebook and Google have to be neutral is super interesting. I still don’t think I completely understand why it is the case that they have to be so incredibly bland but it sounds like you’re onto it. We can remember when Facebook was the elite social media site and MySpace was the ghetto.

I am inclined to suggest that the sectarian/cultural alignments you’re referring to are largely superficial; they are the product of and the content of advertising. I don’t think this takes anything away from your point, though. The heights of national comradery always align with the heights of opposition to an enemy nation. Advertising generates abstractions of this phenomenon a million times over, invoking emotions and activating sales in the name of us and them whether it’s brands, sports teams, subcultures, politicians, etc.

I wrote an essay about Google:

http://yuhongbao.blogspot.com/2018/04/google-doubleclick-moz...

I wonder if there are any other notable Google privacy problems not covered in the essay.

could? SHOULD!

We should all do our part making sure the mistrust spreads because they have both demonstrated that they can't be trusted.

Why do we NEED Facebook and Google again?

It’s 2018. Do we really need intermediaries who we reveal our data in order to achieve basic things?

Collaborate on documents - use Google

Share news with friends - Facebook

Plan an event - Meetup

Host my own mini blog - Twitter, Medium

Seriously?

We have projects like scuttlebutt, dat, SAFE NETWORK coming out. We have cryptocurrencies and distributed ledger technologies.

Personally I started two companies to change all this by building easy-to-use open source platforms to disrupt the centralized models. One is to make social apps. The other is to power currencies and tokens.

2011: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI

2017: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rBU__CCeUxE

I am passionate about the change that’s about to happen. We are not the only ones doing it but I think it will take about 5-10 years before most people are talking across open source, uncensorable, end-to-end encrypted, autonomous, self healing and self rebalancing networks.

The only way you can snoop on such group activities is to have a mole join that particular activity. And by ”activity” I mean anything from a chat to a video game.

And it will be EASIER than the current Internet. There won’t be any questions of “do I host on bluetooth or hostgator” or “my site was blocked in x country” or “help I got slashdotted” because apps would mostly be client side while the static file delivery would be content addressable and rock solid reliable.

A valid question, though the answer may not be quite so glib as you suggest.

Mindshare itself is certainly one factor. De facto standardisation another. Monetisation and tech recruitment, from both a positive aspect and from crowding out other challengers, is also a large part, I suspect.

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