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Comment by droithomme | Hacker News Reader

So this relates to their practice of ransacking all your email contacts without your consent, engaging in data theft as they upload them and analyze them for subsequent actions. And of course Linked In is also notorious for engaging in this criminal vile privacy raping practice.

I remember maybe 8 years ago it was here on HN that a company was found to be doing this and it was shocking to some. But an executive of that company showed up here and said that "everybody does it" and it's "standard practice" and for some years after that anyone complaining about the practice here was not only downvoted but sometimes warned by our glorious compromised moderators.

In my opinion the practice of contact list ransacking should never be allowed, is clearly unethical, and anyone defending it is an enemy of humanity who should be locked away in order to protect society.

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You know someday when we have consumer protection laws for things like this, a company will be forced to trace every piece of derived data on a user based off of what was unlawfully collected - and provably delete it. Instead of simply paying a fine and moving along with the new insights they have on you. Like an entrance fee to the club.

Sidenote: I bet you could make a business out of tracing derived data to comply with lawful orders.

It’ll be very hard because it can be impossible to trace a model back to it’s constituent data, especially if it’s ephemeral

Well see that's the other thing: "Someday" they'll have to make these connections in case they are legally obligated to erase a data source and it's derivatives.

Ephemeral is not an option then, isn't it? In face of regulation, some things can't/shouldn't be optimized. It's already the case for more established industries like pharma.

One way is to make sure the provenance is known from source tuples to all the way to the model version, and (eventually) retrain the model when any records upstream of it are deleted.

AFAIK Palatir made a business model out of this (i.e. tracking provenance for datasets and models, along with permissions).

(Just hearsay, not affiliated with Palantir in any way)

We do (mostly) have these laws: it’s called GDPR. Unfortunately this doesn’t apply to everyone, but the good thing is that it’s forcing the internationals to put the software frameworks in place to deal with it ready for when the US decides to join in.

It's also unfortunate that law makers for 20 years decided that online isn't real so what happens there doesn't really matter.

You wouldn't have liked it if the government started regulating the Internet when it was young. There were proposals in the early 90s that it should be regulated like broadcast radio. So no 7 deadly words, for example. It was good that the government left it alone until its effects on society were better understood.

I remember the crypto wars.

The US government has always controlled the internet. It just made the strategic decision that having a 'free speech' platform accessible to the thought leaders of the 21st century between 1980 and 2010 dealt more damage to its enemies than to itself.

Now that the internet is reaching the majority of people it's gotten worse, more regulated and less free. One only need to look at the 2016 election with it's 'fake news' and compare the US reaction to that of, say Iran in 2009 and see very little difference in rhetoric between the two countries.

LinkedIn is notorious for this. The app still asks for contact access all the time.

Off topic, but I have to ask - what do you use the app for? In my head LinkedIn is a 'work' thing so I only use it on my laptop.

They are the worst... every few months, I will end up with like 20 emails at once asking to connect with a coworker on LinkedIn. They will be to 20 different email lists that I am on, which all get sucked up by LinkedIn and spammed. I don’t even have a LinkedIn account.

The worst is, even if you deny Linkedin access to your contacts. Your contacts will still show up in suggestions, because others have givein LinkedIn access to their contacts. And LinkedIn maps it with your Linkedin signup email address.

Saying that the app asks is not accurate. It's not presented as a choice and it's not clear what will happen when you continue.

you were probably thinking about when Path got caught doing it .

Discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3563016

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632934

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