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Comment by burtonator | Hacker News Reader

By other companies I mean companies like Cambridge Analytica.

There are tons of other shady companies out there doing nefarious things with your data.

We're going to need platforms that support group encryption and better security for apps.

As a person living in the current world, I want to thank you for both standing up against these kind of requests, and for leaving money on the table, which other companies like Cambridge Analitica easily grabbed.

I don't know if there's any way for people/companies like you to defend against unscrupulous companies.

I can only say thank you.

I second the hat tip and gratitude

>We're going to need platforms that support group encryption and better security for apps.

Definitely. Though I also feel we need to give a shock to public awareness of just how evil people can be with this data. My perception is that people are trending towards "vaguely uncomfortable" with the news of foreign interference with targeted ads, election hacking, and so on, but we've a ways to go yet before most will give up supremely-engineered convenience in exchange for security.

As long as the modern world is democratic and the voting populace is subjecting itself to targeted manipulation by data-armed bad actors, we have a problem of not just national security, but international security.

Thanks for being one of the good guys.

Maybe some vigilante can create a website where you can type in anyone's name and it connects to these apis, server-side in a sovereign territory, then spits out redacted info about every facet of that person's life so you know it's legitimate and then get a few big news orgs to pick up the story about tech companies abusing data or something....

So the data is out there and nefarious people are going to be nefarious... but I'd be concerned that such an offering would lower the barrier to entry enough that terrible neighbors might blackmail each over by finding such information. I think a more reasonable approach might be to build up such a service behind a auth lock, execute it for yourself and a journalist and send those two reports and the tool to the journalist.

After the Cambridge Analytica news broke, I thought about writing an amnesiac evil quiz app that did all the CA stuff but then once the user was done, it told them exactly what it did as a way to educate people as to what was possible (and forgot everything it learned once the point was made). This way the evilness is restricted to the person who owns the data (and thus isn't really evil).

I do think there's potential in something along these lines, but I agree with child post that it would need to be done carefully so as not to cause collateral damage. The other question in my mind is how to market it such that people get their friends using it and thus spread the word rather than panicking and reporting it.

Thank you very much for being awesome

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