Zuckerberg's Hawaii estate: battle's latest turn 'devastates' local family | Hacker News Reader

Zuckerberg's Hawaii estate: battle's latest turn 'devastates' local family

theguardian.com

40 pointsJerry230 comments

I love Kaua'i and been there many times and consider the garden island my spiritual home. What Zuckerberg is doing to all those that are poorer than him is evil. I closed my Facebook account earlier this year and I think that people who still are on this platform should take some time to reflect about their values and where to place their trust.

The source of money that powers all these actions, from world-wide democracy wrecking algorithms, to the lack of any kind of decent oversight, to hundreds of Hawaiians losing their land, it is ultimately from the usage of Facebook and its sister products. If that kind of behavior is not OK with you folks, then, why not vote with your wallet and leave? There is a whole decentralized web in the making and and it feels much like the blogosphere. Leave those sillos, stop funding evil people.

... And sorry for the personal post. I often avoid posting from the heart here but I spent the last 16 years going to Kaua'i, basically a large part of my adulthood and what I perceive as myself is linked that to the experiences in that island. I get a bit emotional when multibillionaires go wrecking the place (which already has its share of crap millionaires to be honest).

It interesting that Hawaii's land ownership rules were intended to protect small owners but have in effect made it so that only the rich can afford to wade through all the bullshit to actually acquire new property.

that's the consequence of most rules and regulations supposed to "protect the weak"

Definitely going to need some kind of citation on that one. Pretty much all regulation is to protect the less powerful from the more powerful and to stop people in advantageous positions exploiting others. The rich and powerful can't (in many countries, at least) openly wander around killing and stealing, for example, and the range of regulations down from there covers an enormous amount.

It could go that way but it's usually the most powerful to have the connections with lawmakers and suggest what to write (or not to write) in some laws.

About unintended consequences, check this article about GDPR after one year https://truthonthemarket.com/2019/05/24/gdpr-after-one-year-...

I quote a couple of sentences but there is much more there

> After the rule took effect in May, Google’s tracking software appeared on slightly more websites, Facebook’s on 7% fewer, while the smallest companies suffered a 32% drop, according to Ghostery, which develops privacy-enhancing web technology.

> The fact that Google’s compliance strategy has ended up hurting its competitors and redirecting higher demand back to its own marketplace, where it can guarantee it has user consent, has unsettled publishers and ad tech vendors

If you are an adtech company who's primary business was selling personal information of users, then yes, of course GDPR will have had a big impact. Google has put a lot of effort into being GDPR compliant, so I'd assume a lot of busineses switched away from smaller competitors for that reason.

I run a small SaaS business, which doesn't do anything ethically questional with user data, and becoming compliant involved:

- writing a document on GDPR compliance

- changing a few settings so IPs aren't logged or are at least anonymised

- verifying log files aren't kept longer than needed and don't contain personal information that isn't needed

I don't even need a popup asking for users to give permission to store personal information, because I'm not doing anything that needs that.

did you not get any requests for DPAs, additional certifications, etc?

You don't need to get any certifications to be compliant, it's not like PCI where you need to be certified by a third party. This site has a simple checklist of what you need to do to be compliant:

https://gdprchecklist.io/

Most of the actions you need to take are just respecting the user's privacy and being explicit about how their data is shared. If you use your laptop in a coffee shop you wouldn't expect the barista to stand behind you and watch what you are doing, then share that data with their colleagues and suppliers.

I'd say for a small company it's actually easier than a large company, as you have fewer processes that need to be changed. In my case it was a lot simpler to become compliant for this than VAT MOSS.

I haven't had any requests for data, so I don't have an automated way to export it yet, but if anyone requests it I can build it quickly.

Regulatory Capture is I imagine what the Poster is talking about, it’s happening right now with Facebook’s suggestion that perhaps more regulation is a good idea...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

The use of “ancestral land” gives the misleading impression that the claimants are Hawaiian natives, but in fact they are descendents of a Portuguese immigrant who bought the land in the 1880s. The analogy to colonialism — the taking of indigenous property by invaders - is farcical if not outright appropriation.

You can say that about any land, in any time in history. Humans kept moving and killing each others for 1000 of years. There is not a single place that haven't been taken from somebody else at some point in the last 10k y.

Not to mention immigration, assimilation, raping and slavery that ensure the bloodline of pretty much evrybody was mixed up at some point.

"By the time Zuckerberg purchased the surrounding acres in 2014, the title to the four parcels was divided between hundreds of descendants."

I just don't see how MZ is in the wrong trying to sort out ownership and purchase, for a presumably fair price, such a piece of land.

I really don't want this to come across as rude, but consider this.

Your comment is pretty extreme capitalism apologia. You don't have to be a complete socialist to reasonably consider the idea that maybe a private individual being able to use their power to seize any land they want, points to some major problems in the current social system you have.

I don't want this necessarily to get super political though, so if I've stepped over a line feel free to vote me down into oblivion :)

I just think stories like this are interesting because if you put down your ideaologies and look at the situation you realize nobody is right, but there's some obvious policy changes that are necessary.

He bought the land for more than fair value. He didn't seize anything.

I seized a really nice dinner tonight. Don’t worry, my server seized 20% of the total bill from me.

Yeah, I was surprised to find out that anyone submitting a legitimate bid at least %5 higher than the winning bid basically overrides the result of the already closed auction [0] . Which makes me wonder what's the purpose of an auction if you can revisit it after the fact.

On another note:

> Ownership of the kuleana has sparked a years-long legal dispute involving hundreds of parties that has made international headlines and prompted a public apology from the Facebook CEO, who promised to drop his pursuit of the land in a 2017 letter published in The Garden Island. [0]

What’s one more broken promise when your privacy is at stake? My ability to take this guy's side morally is a purely theoretical concept at this point.

[0] https://www.thegardenisland.com/2019/06/05/hawaii-news/andra...

Maro, I don't know if you're familiar with the whole story but when this started he used some laws to force the lands into auction against the will of the people who lived there. It is not as if he was knocking on the door, announcing a nice deal and accepting no as an answer, which even I who don't like the guy would think it is ok.

He started by using a legal maneuver called "quiet title and partition" which forces under developed land into auction to the highest bidder (which will of course be him). Once he sues using this, the defendant has about 20 days to respond. Since there is a "quiet" part to this maneuver, it means you might not know what is happening until it is too late.

Hawaii land laws are tricky. The history of its monarchy and its demise is heartbreaking but it helps one understand what has happened to land rights over there over time. Zuckerberg is just another rich white person, going there and doing anything necessary to secure a large estate to the detriment of natives and whoever lives there now.

There is a line here that Zuckerberg suggests this is to protect his privacy.

I can't even begin to sort out how messed up that is!

I’m the biggest critic when it comes to user privacy of Facebook (and Google) of anyone in my friend group.

I say that first because I want to establish my bonafides- I genuinely care about user privacy and feel that Facebook has dropped the ball left and right on the matter. What’s worse, it appears that the company and (judging from some of his comments) Mr. Zuckerberg himself don’t believe in such a thing as meaningful privacy in the first place. So it’s not just a case of mistakes made, it’s that Facebook stands opposed to some of my own most cherished values.

Having said all that, I think it’s important to separate Facebook’s corporate actions from Zuckerberg’s private life. Just because his company is engaged in questionable practices doesn’t mean he isn’t entitled to the same benefit of the doubt anyone else enjoys.

And I have to say, if I had his wealth and his fame/notoriety, I’d bloody well want as much real-world privacy as I could get. I think it’s disingenuous to judge him for that or pretend it has any relation at all to Facebook’s policies.

I agree with this sentiment

But I think you'd have to be naïve to think "they trust me, dumb fucks" .. and facebook's corporate disregard for user privacy are wholly unrelated.

I don’t think they are. I very much think he’s complicit in Facebook’s misbehavior.

Those corporate misdeeds are something worthy of as much attention as can be given to them. But I don’t think that has any bearing on whether Zuckerberg himself should be faulted for wanting to protect his family from paparazzi cameras or worse.

>...judging from some of his comments) Mr. Zuckerberg himself don’t believe in such a thing as meaningful privacy in the first place.

>Having said all that, I think it’s important to separate Facebook’s corporate actions from Zuckerberg’s private life.

Those two statements don't jive. If he doesn't believe in meaningful personal privacy then your argument is just a distinction without a difference.

I think the reality is that he cares about his privacy and also likes to make money by monetizing the personal details of other people.

As a serious advocate of online user privacy I hesitate to point this out, but on a really important level there’s a difference between one’s privacy when it comes to one’s online browsing habits and one’s privacy when it comes to paparazzi photographs taken from the neighbor’s house and sold to the highest bidder.

What is the difference precisely?

I would strongly disagree. Most people have something revealed about them in a fb post that would likely be more damaging than some ugly half-naked photos floating around.

“In the UK, I would not be able to take on a client seeking to purchase a property or business in excess of a rational review of their wealth or earning history.”

comedy gold

Funny but at the same time the UK branch of our company has to do a lot more diligence when they on board a new client than we do and that's due to EU regs.

You are right.

Then the trick used in the UK is that it's not "a person" buying a property, it is "a company" (could be registered in the UK or elsewhere). It could be even a company owned by other companies

Example: https://www.transparency.org.uk/press-releases/bbc-panorama-...

There is a good amount of brexit supporters that want to make these regulations even laxer.

In the US, letting clients buy property in excess of their wealth was what created the housing crisis. The tax payer had the dubious honor of bailing out the banks that tried to get rich that way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com