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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

> On the balance, consumers aren't being harmed as they would in a typical antitrust scenario.

I would argue that they are. If private info is the new currency we're paying for access to these services, the price has been constantly increasing as more and more information is collected through tracking and "partnerships". This is one reason why it would be nice to put a dollar value on private data: to make this price increase obvious.

Real competition might look like delivering similar services without requiring as much tracking data to do so.

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One of the problems with claiming that customers are being harmed by the privacy invasion is that the companies can demonstrate that they are only making a few bucks per year per customer on these "privacy invasions", making the most naturally legally defensible definition of the "damage" being done only a few bucks per year, per customer. The argument at that point that the customer receives far more value than that is very, very easy.

Showing that they do much, much more damage to privacy to make that several bucks is going to be legally challenging, and trying to convince a judge that the damage is yet higher because of my aforementioned nebulous concerns about "the social fabric being censored at the metaphorical-neural level" is going to fail unless you get a particularly activist judge, because they're not supposed to be ruling on the basis of such abstract concepts like that. (That's supposed to be what Congress is making laws based on.)

One of the challenges to my mind here is precisely that on the whole, individual customers aren't being harmed. On the whole, individual customers come out ahead. For most people, this is an acceptable bargain and they are substantially on the winning side of it. It is only once a single entity aggregates substantially the entire market that society and democracy starts to be substantially harmed, even as at every moment, there was never a transition point where individual customers changed to being harmed.

I think the issue of pricing is harder than that - damages and the ammount earned don't inherently line up.

If I sit at an intersection and record the cars passing and sell it to the municipal government for say $500 and I note 250 cars they didn't lose $2 each. Just because you can make money off of someone else /doesn't/ mean it is exploitation.

Conversely if someone broke a MRI Machine to steal the copper wire and sell it for $5 it doesn't mean the hospital suffered only that much in damages.

"I think the issue of pricing is harder than that - damages and the ammount earned don't inherently line up."

If you read again, you'll see I acknowledged that already. It's just that the easiest number to defend as the "damages" is the amount earned. But that number is so low that we're going to be trying to claim numbers literally 3 or 4 orders of magnitude higher. That's going to be much harder. Not necessarily impossible, but much harder.

> If private info is the new currency we're paying for access to these services

I would argue that it is not info that's the important issue here, it's share of attention, and the harm suffered by consumers is the unknown effects that is having on their personal wellbeing, as well as society overall.

Of course, there's nothing illegal about this, and forming any sort of a proof of harm would be incredibly difficult. I'm not sure what the proper path is from a legislation angle, but I believe if critical thinking was more valued and promoted, people would be much less vulnerable to harm.

More than that... they are effectively filtering what news and information you see in general terms. More so than even the mainstream media ever could. It's been pretty well established that the people in charge of these organizations have a political bias and are not only able to, but willing to actively shift the messages that people see.

The mainstream media decides what gets published before that content ever even reaches Facebook or Google. In terms of censorship power, the mainstream media is actually further upstream than social media and it can be argued it has more power to decide ultimately what gets published and what doesn’t, especially considering it purely uses human editorial judgment rather than algorithmic.

> I would argue that they are

I don't see the argument. You characterize trackable information as currency, which is a different argument. Information is traded, but is not currency. The market puts a value on data, which degrades IMMEDIATELY, until it's worthless to anyone (eg MySpace data cannot be monetized anymore).

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