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Comment by lawl | Hacker News Reader

This is actually a great comparison, because I think both boil down to (a lack of?) informed consent. I think there's nothing inherently wrong with selling all your data for $20 a month. If you know exactly what you're doing.

Very likely the kid didn't understand exactly all the risks and wasn't informed when selling his kidney. And I would guess it's the same thing for a lot of kids signing up for this facebook thingy thinking "free $20 a month? Let's fucking goooooooo!"

But I honestly feel just as creeped out by apple dictating what people can install on their phones and what they can't.

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The danger is judging informed consent by what we would find acceptable. It's conceivable that one could understand the risks yet not appreciate the probability involved, or have a value system skewed towards present gratification. The point is that the concept of informed consent in cases like this don't really add much information.

You're allowed to set your value system however you want, that's not my business. My issue is just that there is no details on their server-side security, and that the terms used to describe the effect of the root certificate are not nearly strong enough. But if someone truly is informed about who is collecting this then their's nothing wrong, other than FB violating their agreement with Apple which I trust Apple is seriously chewing them out for.

I think there's nothing inherently wrong with selling all your data for $20 a month. If you know exactly what you're doing.

Informed consent is _impossible_ here because there is no way a person can know what future use the data will be put, and Facebook sure as shit ain't gonna tell, and they're even less likely to limit their future use of the data through an agreement made in the present.

If they don't limit and detail all use of the data, collection would (probably) be illegal under the gdpr.

See, I felt like it was not a great comparison because a body part is a very different thing from web traffic. Since Facebook does not stand to gain anything from inflicting material harm on you, the expected value of giving them your data is at worst very slightly negative. They’re likely not even recording most of it. (What would they do with it?) The same can emphatically not be said of a mission critical singly-redundant organ.

you may not feel immediate effects but at a societal scale it does come back to bite you

They can’t run this program on a societal level because it would cost too much (>100B a year in the US alone, which is surely more than the value they derive from it). So we really only need to be concerned about whether this hurts the individuals involved, and whether Facebook plans to do anything unethical with the data.

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