Comment by scarejunba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scarejunba | Hacker News Reader

The real problem is that people are selling this bullshit that the only alternatives are someone spying on you through your metaphorical bedroom window or you blindfold every company that interacts with you.

I don't want a world where I pay for everything. When I was a child, I used a whole bunch of ad supported websites that only existed because they were ad supported.

Everyone wants to coddle people and ensconce them in layers of paternalistic nonsense. FYI I would happily sell the private data I did then in exchange for the service I received a hundred times over.

Those forums and websites were the ones that led to me being what I am today. Even a ten cent fee would have crippled my ability to grow into what I'm today because I had no means to pay it online.

Enough with your bullshit. Let me be a goddamn person and give people things voluntarily so they can give me things voluntarily. Just stop inserting yourselves into every interaction I have with other people that's between the two of us.

Instead now everyone wants to create this environment where I can't sell my private data because it's a bloody adventure to try to invalidate my right to then delete myself immediately.

It's okay now because I make a half million a year and my kids will be fine. But the next me won't be so lucky.

> The real problem is that people are selling this bullshit that the only alternatives are someone spying on you through your metaphorical bedroom window or you blindfold every company that interacts with you.

There's a middle ground, called "regulation".

For many decades now there have been rules regulating advertisements ("commercial speech"), sources of addictive behavior (gambling, alcohol, cigarettes), and monopolies. It seems reasonable to propose that these rules should apply to Facebook and other "new media", to the extent that they are ad-supported, may promote addictive behavior, and may be monopolies.

Applying these regulations to the internet does not mean shutting down ad-supported websites, any more than they prevented ad-supported newspapers and TV stations from thriving back in the day.

Yes, but the dialogue has become unhinged. So many of the critics don’t want reasonable middle-ground regulation. They want to destroy these companies, or have the state take them over and operate them as a public utility. There is no measure of reasonable regulations that doesn’t strip Zuckerberg and Bezos of their wealth and prestige that will satisfy many critics.

There was a story yesterday about how Twitter had a bug on Android that toggled a setting by mistake and people were clamoring for heavy penalties, that this should be illegal, that these companies need to die in a fire. Over a simple bug that’s probably of a class that literally every developer on this site has made many times.

Reddit is even worse. Anything critical of these companies, no matter how minor or untrue, garners tens of thousands of upvotes and a pitchfork-wielding mob in the comments. Good luck trying to explain that we need reasonable regulation but that Mark will still be a billionaire running one of the world’s most valuable companies and getting richer off ads.

Sure, you can find extremists on both sides: the "nationalize Facebook" people, and the "nothing on the internet should ever be regulated" folks. Not having read the book under review ("Surveillance Capitalism"), I can't say whether the author is all the way over in the "nationalize" camp.

But currently, we need more regulation, not less, on internet companies whose business model is based on selling your attention to persuaders at a time when you are most vulnerable to persuasion. So although I don't favor nationalization, and I don't begrudge Zuckerberg his vast wealth, I want to see things move in the direction of more regulation, not less.

There is a slippery slope no matter where you stand, but yet, you have to stand somewhere.

I like that last sentence. Well said.

I'm not against regulation. I just want to ensure that it allows me to get a no-access-fee Internet when I want without screwing the guy giving it to me. That outcome is less desirable to me than the current state. The outcome that is more desirable to me than the current state is when opting out is easy, opting in is easy, and I can fairly give someone my data in exchange for a service for some duration of time.

Fully agreed. The part of GDPR that I don't like is that it doesn't let people and companies agree to the use of a service in exchange for advertising using their personal data. People should be allowed to decide they are OK with that. Sure, make the services be explicit about it or make it opt-in, but they should also be able to deny service to those who opt out.

There are many sorts of things that we as a society agree to control in such a way that individuals are not given the option to be special case consenters to them.

Toxic substances, willful enslavement, extreme firearms, explosives, biological weapons. Or even simpler, choosing to operate a personal vehicle without insurance (even if you assert you’re willing to bear the financial risks it entails). The list is probably a lot longer than this.

What we’re just waking up to is that wealth centers are capable of degrees of engineering for behavioral tracking to support a scope of privacy intrusion that average citizens (or even coalitions of fairly sophisticated citizens) are absolutely nowhere close to being able to understand or cope with.

There is simply no decision making framework that exists today in which we can possibly understand how a person consenting to this data collection would be at risk in the future, how their friends or children who possibly did not consent might be at risk by extension, and so on.

Just as a libertarian extreme notion of simply letting free parties consent to a transaction falls apart when you’re talking about buying or selling a supervirus, so too does it fall apart when you’re talking about letting people “opt in” to having their entire sensory trail of generated behavioral data be commercialized.

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