Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

I know I sound like a broken record on Huawei posts (too many friends' parents lost their jobs over it) but it's worth pointing out that Huawei has an (alleged) record relating to stealing information for their own gain, ie: they stole a lot of IP from Nortel in the 90s[0], possibly others. Then they competed in the same market with a fraction of the R&D budget and buried Nortel.

Don't think about this in terms of just governments tracking you. Consider if you have any work emails containing company secrets in them. Consider if you have 2FA apps installed that you would use to unlock or change your work password. And since it was almost certainly the Chinese Intel/Military that helps Huawei and other companies, you can be sure that whatever information Huawei gets access to doesn't need to just help them out, but might help any other company the Chinese government wants to see succeed.

Google and Apple might use your data to better target ads against you. That's terrible, but doesn't seem so bad in comparison.

[0]https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/former-nortel-exec-warns-ag...

Nortel willingly sacrificed its ip to profit from building the great firewall of China

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/2010-...

I was really skeptical when I saw Huawei racks/cabinets being sold/promoted at the HK OpenStack Summit years ago.

I'd feel really uncomfortable running my 'private' cloud on that gear.

I wonder what state-benefits Alibaba is providing upstream given their reach these days.

If you think "promoting" is bad, try giving out free hardware.

I toured datacenters in Malaysia and the amount of Huawei equipment is unbelievable. All major telco DC are using them.

I asked around and most are saying that Huawei gave away their hardware for almost no initial cost. Huawei even supply their engineer to migrate away from Cisco/Juniper.

What do you mean by, "too many friends' parents lost their jobs over it"?

(Thanks for posting this info. about Huawei.)

I’m guessing they worked at Nortel

Thanks. That makes sense.

I grew up in the Ottawa region. One of my closest friends, his Dad lost his job, his pension[0], and the entire local IT market crumbled. The guy became a carpenter I believe- which is awesome- but starting over when you already have teenage kids is really tough.

[0]Nortel's pension plan primarily invested in Nortel stocks. Genius, right? There's now laws in place entirely because of that debacle.

>Google and Apple might use your data to better target ads against you.

Apple does not use your data for ad targeting.

Apple actively uses data about expenditures to build a profile about individuals and then has its retail pawns lie and deceive unknowing customers into unnecessary purchases. Same level of moral bankruptcy, only much more egregious because they present themselves innocently in an immensely self-serving manner. Zero ethics

Could you explain that a bit better. I don’t understand how it works.

I think it would be helpful if you explained yourself. Or are you talking about iPhone 6 battery throttling palaver where they slowed down devices with other batteries to stop them crashing. In that case, yes it was stupid they way they failed to communicate that. But the while company has zero ethics? IOS 12 has given my 6 another couple of years of life, I estimate.

from your link:

"Shields admits he has no proof Huawei was behind the hacking of Nortel. He says there were system infiltrations coming from around the world, but any time information was downloaded, the hack came from China."

I've eyed the lower cost phones from Chinese brands. But I have a hard time generating trust.

I don't know whether or how much better off I am with a U.S. based brand/"manufacturer". All this stuff is is made over there, and brands continue to migrate, as well (Motorola, ThinkPad (it's Lenovo's, now -- as is Motorola, for that matter), etc.). Barring better choices, I'm hoping that the U.S. part of the operation is keeping an eye out and testing for deviations.

With all the Chinese stuff, I keep thinking, TANSTAAFL.

Why is ad targeting "terrible"?

Consider an alternative scenario: you're a business person and you present an alcoholic beverage to someone you know is an alcoholic because you are paid to do so. You know they've had substance abuse problems in the past (you have all the metadata!) but you turn a blind eye because $. Is that morally acceptable to you?

Just because it produces revenue for a few ad tech companies doesn't make it objectively good. Marketing bs products to people through online ads is no different than giving crack to kids, presenting the idea of a major life solution through pretty fonts and flashy user flows when in fact most products are just stupid and ill-conceived from start to finish. If I left a tab after checking out a product and didn't buy it, it probably sucks. But repeatedly shoving it in someone's face through advertising after visits, for one concrete example, basically pushes people into situations they didn't consent to. It is total manipulation and its reprehensible - its just slightly more abstract and people get drawn into the "well just dont buy it!" narrative.

It is a fact that an increasingly large number of people have poor impulse control and pretending it doesn't is not equivalent to predatory activity being OK.

> It is a fact that an increasingly large number of people have poor impulse control

Got a link to this data?

> Consider an alternative scenario: you're a business person and you present an alcoholic beverage to someone you know is an alcoholic because you are paid to do so

I'm sure there's a good counter example to the notion of 'ad targeting is terrible', but this is not it. If one goes by this example, you'd need companies to know that you are an alcoholic in order to avoid advertising to them, which seems to be an extremely personal piece of data. Surely your point is not that this is an acceptable compromise in order to avoid alcoholics ever seeing an ad for alcohol?

They invade my privacy to do it.

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