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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

What Facebook, politicians, and many others fail to understand is that there's a difference between legal and morally right.

Facebook makes it exceedingly easy for people to hate them, while technically doing nothing wrong. Well sometimes they break the law, but then Zuckerberg just says he's sorry and we all move on.

It's getting tiresome to watch our industry behave recklessly in the pursuit of ad revenue and the push to collect more and more data about the unsuspecting public.

I enjoy my work in IT, but companies like Facebook, and increasingly Google and Apple, then entire IoT business and a ton of startups are increasingly pushing me towards being less connected, less interested in new technology. It seems like a huge chunk of industry is misguided. I'm sick and tired of it.

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I am slowly turning into a Luddite. Whenever new devices come out I immediately wonder how they are used to spy on people as main purpose and helping people is secondary.

The ad-supported business model really has corrupted tech to the core.

To be fair, the said app clearly told people what exact data would be collected and how it will be used. If people does want and chose to sell their data, is that still morally corrupt for the company collecting the data?

In my experience large majority of non-tech people do not care much about their data being collected and would be happily accept monetary reward for things like their location history, usage stats etc. Assume that data collector is using this information to show you relevant ad. I wonder why would it be so much bad to see relevant ad then irrelevant ad? It's not that you are going to stop seeing ads anytime soon.

So the question is: If data producer is happy to sell the information and data collector is using it to enhance the user experience (i.e. no evil intent), would you still consider this bad or immoral?

> To be fair, the said app clearly told people what exact data would be collected and how it will be used.

Did it explain the consequences of installing a root certificate through?

>legal and morally right

I guess the first question is, if I do something illegal, but either avoid being captured or manage to otherwise avoid prosecution by using money or influence, have I done something wrong, legally speaking?

Because there is an argument to be made that making money off of children's consent to contracts is legally wrong, but because of the widespread nature of doing such by those who have enough political power to impact how laws are enforced, the laws are not enforced to protect children. That we aren't correctly enforcing laws that protect taking advantage of a child by using consent that can't legally exist does not make the action legally right, or if it does, then we are effectively invoking the notion of "it isn't illegal if you don't get caught".

What you fail to understand is that the average layman doesn't care about data collection and ad tech. If it pisses you off that people don't care about the same things you do, welcome to politics.

What I care about are companies that simply have no moral compass. If no one at Google or Facebook think that they're pushing a little too hard to get ever more data about their users, then something is terribly wrong at those companies.

Google is particularly fascinating, their employees protest when their parent company want to be a supplier to the US military, but apparently they have no moral objection to building detailed profiles on users (and non-users) in order to sell them more junk that they don't need and can't afford.

The whole data collection thing is so abstract that the same people who don't want their employer to kill people with drone can't see the immorality of invading people privacy. If that's the case, then how can we expect the layman to understand or care?

> the average layman doesn't care about data collection and ad tech

True. But Facebook has managed—by demonstrating a repeated recklessness, unwillingness to reform and immortality that seems fundamental to its culture—to energise a vocal minority in a way no other tech company has. This vocal minority, moreover, is wealthy, politically connected and bipartisan.

This is already resulting in costs and reduced strategic flexibility for Facebook’s senior leadership. I expect it to turn into an existential threat for the company, as it’s currently organised, in the coming years.

There is a difference between not informed, and doesn't care.

How many people would be comfortable if you laid out the full spectrum of what is possible with the data that is collected, and how said data is distributed and sold?

Its frankly a massively dishonest claim that people "don't care so its all fine".

Users realise that the ads they see are targeted to them, and infer that those ads are chosen depending on their activity. Do you think people would stop using Facebook if you told them about this? Or maybe you're wishing for the government to step in?

> Users realise that the ads they see are targeted to them, and infer that those ads are chosen depending on their activity.

My experience is that most people are surprised and mildly horrified that Facebook has most of their browsing history.

Can't Facebook at least pay for effective reputation management?

All those new accounts accusing critics of hating Facebook are really rather ineffective.

Sheryl should get the "definers" to cook up some new Soros conspiracy material to use as ammo.

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