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Comment by macinjosh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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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