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Comment by mikeq101101 | Hacker News Reader

>these guys are blatantly fighting the law in order to continue being shady

As much as I hate Facebook, your initial assumption is wrong. The fact that the state deeds something illegal doesn't mean it's wrong, and vice versa. The state is a terrible arbiter of morality.

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Who else do we, the people, have to enforce our rights on our behalf if not the state? It's not as if we can count on Facebook (or any other major corporation) to stand up for our rights in the face of extracting even more money out of our personal data. We need the might of the state to fight back against these entities.

In Islamic societies, the tyranny of the state is supposed to be checked by the power of religion. Unfortunately, we can all see how well that's going!

Where does OP imply the state is an arbiter of morality? OP does not say "fighting the law is shady," they say "these guys are blatantly fighting the law in order to continue being shady." The assumption here is that the practice Facebook is fighting to preserve is shady.

> The fact that the state deeds something illegal doesn't mean it's wrong, and vice versa. The state is a terrible arbiter of morality.

It's far better at it than a corporation focused on chasing "shareholder value."

Most people would prefer to NOT be tracked, and would consider tracking to be immoral (a privacy violation). Tracking is like having a stalker. Even if the stalker never does anything with your lifestyle habits, routines, preferences, etc, no one would consider that data to be moral for any individual to hold (and by extension any company).

The only reason we balk at thinking of tracking as immoral is because it's hugely unrealistic to combat it and outlaw it. And also because companies benefit enormously from it.

> Most people . . .

Citation needed? If we’re just swapping anecdotes, my experience has been that the vast majority of people I talk to are fine with being tracked on the internet, and think it’s a reasonable exchange for what they get out of it.

Is there survey data, for instance, that shows people actually feel strongly about this?

Edited to add: I think the most relevant survey data is people voting with their feet. And despite the 24-hour news cycle of Facebook privacy SNAFUs (both intentional and not), their user numbers aren't really falling off.

It's hard to take people seriously when they say "what Facebook does is profoundly evil, but it's outweighed by the value of cat videos/Crossfit videos/Tasty recipes/reading the political rants of acquaintances I haven't spoken to in a decade." :/

In my experience, that's only the case because they have no bloody clue about how much they're being tracked.

Also, from 2012-2013:

Study Finds Broad Wariness Over Online Tracking: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/most-americans...

Survey: 3 Out Of 4 Consumers Now Notice Retargeted Ads: https://marketingland.com/3-out-4-consumers-notice-retargete...

I've seen that "tracking in exchange for free service" notion around HN a bit before, it sort of makes sense. But what about the case when you're paying for everything and still getting tracked?

I think most people expect tracking by the website that they're on, and ONLY that website. That's mainly for improving the website experience and so on. It wouldn't be a privacy violation since it's only their behavior for that website specifically, and no behavior from the other websites.

So in reality we're talking about websites that allow third party tracking or sell tracking information to third parties. That's a privacy violation.

Who is the arbiter then? The black box of "the markets" or corporations? In a democracy you get the state you vote for. The state has far more right that any other institution to dictate morality.

>In a democracy you get the state you vote for.

That is a lie. I didn't vote for the current state, and neither did majority of citizens.

The US has a number of explicitly anti-democratic institutions (the electoral college, the senate) that almost certainly wouldn't be devised if you were starting fresh.

I mean, can you imagine proposing tomorrow, "in rural parts of the country, let's give people 3x the voting power of those in urban parts of the country"? And yet, here we are.

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