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Comment by unquietcode | Hacker News Reader

Facebook gonna Facebook. It's long past time to consider regulation of an ethically bankrupt corporation.

"four months ago" they stopped requiring it for 2FA, that's the time GDPR came in.

I wonder if Facebook acts differently for European users?

No regulation needed, just avoid using their 'services' and block anything facebook at the point of access. They might keep 'shadow profiles' and use facial recognition to find you on images posted by others but if you keep them out of your network they can have a ball trying to target their advertising at that closed door.

Not that I allow any advertising here, mind you - everything is blocked at the router (ipset [1] comes in handy here), at the client and in the browser. This works at home as well as abroad since I route all my data through a VPN (OpenVPN) terminating at my router.

[1] http://ipset.netfilter.org

Then it definitely sounds like regulation is required, the vast majority of Facebook's users don't know how to do all that. The public should not have to protect themselves from unethical companies, the companies should have to stop with their unethical behavior lest the government shuts them down.

Drawn to its logical extreme, you don't need regulation to be protected from racketeering if you run a restaurant either, you can just hire private security and arm yourself.

It would be really surprising if that was a facebook only thing. For starters Google pesters me at least as much to add my phone number to secure my account.

I think it will stop pestering you for a phone number if you give it some neutral second factor like a Security Key ?

(Security Keys are actually way more anonymous than I'd even thought possible until I understood how they work, if you know Susie uses the same key for DropBox and GitHub, and you suspect Susie also uses this key for the account NumberOneSecretTrumpFan on GitHub, and then you steal all the account credentials from GitHub somehow, this doesn't end up being enough to verify that Susie has the same key as NumberOneSecretTrumpFan, nor is it enough to sign into Susie's DropBox account, and unless GitHub's data includes the backup passphrases or whatever it's not even enough to sign into GitHub as Susie, NumberOneSecretTrumpFan, or any other Security Key user...)

I'm not sure how it is now, but for a long time Google required you to enable SMS auth (by giving your phone number) before you could enable TOTP or other 2FA methods.

you generally don't regulate companies, but whole industries. Then you punish companies for breaking the industry regulations.

Why have costly government regulation when users can just quit?

Plenty of other online and offline ways to connect with the people in your life.

Users cannot "just quit". Facebook probably has a profile for my grandma who never touched a PC in her whole life.

Many people can't quit because they are addicted, but there is an option to permanently delete your account and it takes about 5min. I'm not aware of Facebook creating profiles for people that haven't signed up for their service. If so, that should definitely be illegal.

The government should have bigger fish to fry than trying to regulate the distribution of information that you have and continue to willingly provide to a company. If you don't like it, sure government could jump in and make Facebook just how you like it, or you could delete the info you don't want them to have. The later sounds easier on everyone.

Why have costly government regulation when people can just not breathe polluted air?

There are some things users/people did not sign up for and cannot (reasonably) opt out of that still harm them. This is what regulations are for.

Air is a necessity, Facebook is not. I don't use Facebook and personally don't want my tax dollars spent overseeing a non-essential service. I'd rather send our tax dollars towards environmental pollution and areas that actually affect us all much more seriously.

The point wasn't that Facebook is a necessity. It's that Facebook is unavoidable.

Unfortunately, whether you created a profile or not, you can't just "not use Facebook" with their whole shadow profiles.

Sure, they aren't (currently) pumping waste into the environment. I'm not saying those things aren't important, but I do think we're going to look back 10 years from now and wonder how we let Facebook even get this bad.

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