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Comment by dominicr | Hacker News Reader

I think the issues are: - they were collecting data from users who were below legal age for responsibility and/or local laws about collecting data about minors. - The general public know very little about everything. Companies have a moral duty to not only educate their users but also to not do wrong.

Personal responsibility is a flag many people wave but it's a farce. That argument can be used for anything, from seatbelts, to smoking, to privacy. It is impossible for everyone to know enough to make informed choices about EVERYTHING. There is a need for societal organisations (governments, NGOs, responsible journalism) to provide guidance to the public and legal limits in order to provide protection to the whole.

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How interesting that you would choose as your examples "seatbelts", "smoking", and "privacy".

If you print in large letters on every pack of cigarettes, "SMOKING KILLS" and people still choose to smoke, should a benevolent government be allowed to prevent an individual's poor choice?

Right now, we allow the sale of cigarettes and prohibit the sale of raw milk.

Don't you see any room for personal responsibility? None?

Smoking is an interesting example because the negative effects aren't just confined to the individual. Smoking a cigarette is the atmospheric equivalent of peeing in the pool except it also causes cancer and other health issues. Maybe it's actually an important example because it's an undeniable illustration of 2nd order effects, which are less pronounced in other cases but probably still exist.

And "any room for personal responsibility"? There are plenty of domains of behavior that aren't regulated; there's a whole world of choices individuals are responsible for alone.

Various forms of regulation regarding smoking, seat belts, and yes, even raw milk are all working in areas where limited human capacity for evaluating risk meets deadly consequences. Privacy is arguably different since it's unlikely to be directly deadly, but it does meet risk evaluation limits and adds in that incentives of 3rd parties are against individual incentives, and many of those 3rd parties have incredible resources available to them in order to obscure behavior and subvert protections. A collective response is a reasonable one.

Privacy also meets your test for “second-hand” negative effects. You can be a monk, but someone snapping a picture and writing up a post can destroy your privacy as well as using the service yourself. More realistically, you can use FB for the bare minimum, but if your friends and family use it a lot, your privacy is gone again.

Some of the people using the Facebook spy app in this case were as young as 13 -- with "signed parental consent forms".

What do you think would be the proper response to a store selling cigarettes to 13-year-olds as long as they had a parent's signature? I think we'd still step in and stop them. The government can even revoke their license to sell tobacco to anyone in that case.

There's no "personal responsibility" at issue here. Our society has decided that 13-year-olds aren't old enough to give consent. I suspect there would have been less outcry, and for a different reason, had everyone involved in this issue been above the age of majority.

I'm eagerly waiting for Facebook to release T&C with terms as simple as "SMOKING KILLS". Yes, companies have to cover their asses and legalese is complex, but I'm assuming that nothing prevents them from having simplified, non-binding version of T&C available.

My first thought is that the simplified terms would be argued to be the real terms in court.

Isn't it something that more legalese in T&C could solve? Or a huge warning before simplified terms? I think I've seen few companies publish simplified terms, but I'd have to search for the examples now.

Do I need to go through 500 pages of convoluted legal bullshit to understand smoking kills me?

I'm not sure seatbelts/smoking are the best examples, because the negative consequences are quite clear and understood by most of society. I've never met a smoker that continued to smoke under the assumption it was good for them.

The consequences of privacy violations are much more nuanced; most people don't understand how data they enter onto a website will be used. And it's clear a lot of those companies want to continue to keep people in the dark about it, because it would likely freak them out.

Thought experiment: if cigarettes were invented today, do you think they would be legal?

Wow, what a condescending view point that people can't possibly think through things on their own without other people making decisions for them.

1. Parents need to monitor their child's Internet and phone activity. Why is it FB's responsibility to do that for them?

2. Smoking, seatbelts, and privacy are all personal choices that people should be able to make for themselves. You don't need to know that much to make an informed choice. It's called common sense and it is something that is disappearing and with it so are our rights.

> Wow, what a condescending view point that people can't possibly think through things on their own without other people making decisions for them.

...

> Smoking, seatbelts, and privacy are all personal choices that people should be able to make for themselves.

There is a legal minimum age for purchasing cigarettes. Most states have laws requiring the use of seatbelts. So why shouldn’t some power, be it governmental or corporate, push people towards protecting their privacy?

If you’re going to cherrypick counterexamples to the idea that people can think things through and make the right decision for themselves maybe try picking, ya know, counterexamples?

Monitoring internet activity is FB’s business. That’s how they make their money. That’s the product they sell to advertisers. Since this is their product they have responsibilities in this regard, no?

If I let you monitor all of my internet activity then no big deal. There are no society wide consequences from this. If a company the size of Facebook can do this then there are society wide consequences. Some of those consequences are good and some are bad. We need to mitigate the bad consequences. This is analogous to the mortgage industry problems back in 2008. If I make a bad loan to you no big deal. But if I make millions of bad loans that can wreck the entire economy then there’s a problem that society ought to mitigate against.

Actually I'm really happy that I was informed from my young age that smoking decreases my life expectancy. I never smoked in my life (except once-twice for trying it out).

I wish I knew this for air pollution as well, as I didn't care about it, and now I'm feeling the consequences every day.

Just the fact that smoking can lead to cancer is a recent development that improved the lives of so many people, it's statistically significant in the average life expectancy of the human race. But to get here it took fight from many researchers, regulators and non-profit organizations. This has nothing to do with common sense.

One more thing: have you seen the video of the child who's smoking at 2? Is he doing it because he's lacking common sense?

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