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Comment by jlangenauer | Hacker News Reader

I am reminded of Thoreau's quote: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

The root of the problem is not that we have bots, but that we have normalised lying and deception as part of everyday business. We allow companies to pretend that bots are human beings, and allow call-center employees in third-world countries to pretend (even sometimes though elaborate lying) that they are located in the same country as you. We allow companies to tell outrageous untruths in their advertising - see the Samsung ad which they're currently being hauled over the coals for in Australia.

That's the real problem here, and the one we need to fix on a general level, not by band-aid regulations over whichever dishonesty has managed to irritate enough state representatives.

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> see the Samsung ad which they're currently being hauled over the coals for in Australia.

For people not in the know, apparently Samsung is marketing its latest phones as water proof with ads showing surfers and people fully clothed under water. ACCC does not approve of this, as the phones aren't IP rated for use in salt water.

https://www.techradar.com/news/samsung-is-getting-sued-in-au...

If someone were to post on twitter about how they would murder Samsung executives, then no matter how many small print disclaimers saying that 'they were talking about killing the expectations of the executives by showing them an enjoyable time like no other' would save them from legal prosecution. Advertisements should be treated the same. The way normal people view implications in the ads constitute the actual ad and no amount of fine print can change that.

Samsung isn’t the only one. Apple is similar too in its carve outs for water damage in it’s warranty. Im guessing samsung weasels out of it by saying water ‘resistance’ vs proof, but still marketing it with surfers and such? My water resistant series 3 apple watch screen died after swimming in a pool the next day to give a personal example.

> My water resistant series 3 apple watch screen died after swimming in a pool the next day to give a personal example.

That's... surprising. To be clear, I'm not saying I don't believe you. But I'm definitely surprised - I've got a Series 2 which I get wet every day and even use while swimming and I haven't had any issues. My mother has a Series 2 or 3 which she also regularly uses while swimming.

Per Apple's documentation[0]

> Apple Watch Series 2, Apple Watch Series 3, and Apple Watch Series 4 may be used for shallow water activities like swimming in a pool or ocean.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205000

My wife's favorite watch is the Timex Women's Ironman Triathlon 50. The watch is labeled as being water resistant to 50 meters. Most complaints about this watch are that the band is crap and breaks after about a year of unextraordinary use. The other, is that after minimal contact with water, the inside of the watch face steams up. These aren't expensive watches, but they aren't cheap either.

Not sure how a watch intended for Triathlon use has a reputation for the band breaking at the slightest stress and the inside of the watch fogging after an ordinary dip in 3 feet of water. How does a watch like this pass QA and not get investigated (or sued) for false advertising?

I would assume that it's not a QA issue, but rather it's designed to perform well enough that 95% of customers don't complain. If 95% of customers don't get it wet or don't get particularly angry when they do, then designing it to be more waterproof would under-optimize the company's resources.

A lot of the things we take for granted about the benefits of living in a capitalist society are side effects of capitalists traditionally not being very good at their jobs and giving customers stuff/benefits unintentionally. That seems to be going away thanks to IT and increased testing of assumptions.

My theory is since the screen is held to the watch with glue [0], heat exposure will cause the glue to unset slightly and break the waterproof seal. So over time your watch may lose it's seal from exposure to being in a hot day.

The malfunction happened to me after owning the watch for 14 months, and I swam with it in the ocean on month 4 with no problems. It was also fine on the first day, the issue started happening the day after. My theory is a very small amount of water got in, but it was enough to damage the oled screen inside.

The solution would be not using glue, but using screws or a bayonet on the back, but then it won't look like a seamless object. Maybe in the new non-jony era of apple they will make their watches properly waterproof? I doubt it although.

[0] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Apple+Watch+Series+3+Display+Re...

Apple is pretty clear about its water performance: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205000

Sorry to hear about your watch. I’ve been lucky enough to have it in the water plenty and never have a problem. Maybe go to an Apple store?

I got a series 4 watch as a father's day gift and went swimming the following weekend. My watch went insane (it tried to dial 911 about 5 times and wouldn't accept any input to try to stop it) and then died. I took it to my local Apple store and they were rather stern about too much water and it probably being my fault, but sent it off to the repair center anyway. But... Apple sent a replacement via FedEx that arrived less than 48 hours later.

Set it in water mode before entering the pool. Otherwise the touchscreen might register touch events in the water.

Fine print you have to look up, without having any real reason to look for it in the first place, is not being clear at all. It's like saying, it's in the EULA, they're pretty clear about it!

Unless it's up front and center as part of set up, it's not being upfront.

Really? You think this rather clear and short document detailing to which extent the Apple Watch is water resistant is basically the same thing as iTunes’ EULA?

It‘s up front and the fact that it takes more than a bullet point on the back of the box to explain the details and limits of the feature doesn‘t change that.

Here‘s the description from Apple‘s official Watch marketing page:

> Sweat, surf, and swim proof. Apple Watch Series 4 is water resistant to 50 meters and tracks both pool and open-water workouts. Turn the Digital Crown to eject water from the speaker using a burst of sound.

I don‘t see this contradicted by additional support document.

Just because an EULA is well written, doesn't mean that more than %0.1 of their customers will still read it. If they put this document inside their EULA, nobody will still read it, and I would argue it's more hidden than a EULA because you have to think about looking it up on the internet. If people look it up, they will do it after their watch breaks, and by then it's too late.

They also don't disclose that they have water damage carve outs, which shows they know their water resistance wears out quickly enough that they need the carve out for financial reasons.

"Swim proof" the watch is not. Apple's advertising, whats in the box & paper manual, what copy is shown on the store, and what text that shows up on the watch when you set it up does not warn of any of this.

Also go ask a cross section of the population what water resistant to 50 meters means and they probably will give you the more common understanding of waterproof.

My Apple Watch series 0 (a watch that wasn't marketed as waterproof) had a dozen+ days in the ocean and 50+ dunks in a pool and suffered no malfunction. You must have had a bad quality item.

It may not be officially recommended, but I know people who have gone surfing with recent model iPhones and Apple watches. They seem to do fine, but maybe that's just luck?

They can claim it all they want. When I go to a water-involved activity, my phone goes into a zipper-lock plastic bag that is ostensibly for pills, but is exactly the size required for my phone. Then that bag goes opening-end first into another zippered plastic bag. A capacitative touch screen still works through two layers of plastic water resistance. It's usually the direct sunlight that makes it unusable.

Even if I wasn't worried about the water, what about beach sand?

If an advertisement told me my phone was bulletproof, and showed a video of one getting shot, I would take extra precautions to ensure that it never came into contact with loose bullets, and to store it well away from ammunition or containers that previously held ammunition. That is how much I proactively mistrust ad content.

And if the article I read is true, they aren't honoring the warranty in the case of water damage.

Correct, my phone died after briefly exposing it to salt weather on a beach. I was misled by the ads I saw, there was no implication except in very fine print that saltwater will immediately fry your phone.

Well, frankly, fuck them. Last year on vacation I was this close to taking my phone to the sea with me, because obviously it's "waterproof" (as their marketing copy tells me). Only my wife reminded me that just because they say it is, doesn't mean it actually is, and especially doesn't mean I should risk my expensive phone to test that theory on vacation.

Strongly agreed.

I didn't want to post yet another "reason #651235 why I loathe adtech" comment, but that's really it. Bots pretending to be people wouldn't be of interest at this level if it was just criminals trying to scam people - it would be just another type of crime. This is a problem because of the almost-fraud tactics of sales and marketing that, for some reason, happen to be on the right side of the legal line. I suggest we move that line to solve this problem.

Ad: It does EVERYTHING!!!!

2pt font on page 14: Except this page of exclusions, and conflicting exclusions, and the fact the company can add any of their choosing at any time without notice.

Many ads have in tiny print "for illustration purposes only, do not attempt", ie. when showcasing some fantasy use-case of the product.

That copy should really be "for deception purposes only".

> Bots pretending to be people wouldn't be of interest at this level if it was just criminals trying to scam people

How about foreign agents trying to influence elections at scale, or inciting civil unrest?

How do you enforce the law against foreign agents?

Create some accountability to those who allow it?

AKA: If you pay a foreign agency to run a social media bot campaign go to prison. And get sued by the social media company.

The real problem then, is that corporations have unchecked power. No one acting behind them is personally liable for their illegal behavior.

Corporations can't go to jail. They only pay fines that are a fraction of their profits from the illegal behavior, which is a mathematical incentive for them to break the law before their competitors.

Even in silicon valley, we laud AirBNB, Uber, Facebook, Google, et al.

Do you want corporations to be better or not care?

I’m a fan of forcing corporations to issue shares to the victims.

Do something minor? 10% dilution. Do something worthy of the corporate death penalty? Issue 100 shares for every share outstanding.

Of course, the issued shares would have as many votes as the maximum currently issued share (so if the founders get 10 votes per share that is what the victims get too).

Note that you can set precedents based on percentage ownership, so this naturally scales to large (and small) companies.

If this were common practice, I guarantee you that companies would be a lot more careful to obey the law: The ceo, founders, and investors all would have a bigger personal financial incentive to obey the law than to break it.

"I’m a fan of forcing corporations to issue shares to the victims."

Typically, the victims of corporate malfeasance are considered to be the (existing) shareholders, in the American system. Like, there's a lawsuit on behalf of the shareholders when pretty much anything goes wrong that affects the stock price. There's quite a contrast to the common opinion on HN and elsewhere, where the shareholders are identified with the corporate malefactors.

Fascinating suggestion. I'm trying to think of consequences.

Among those: if lawyers get 30% of settlements, then large consumer-rights law firms could end up as major shareholders. That could get v. interesting several ways.

Brings up one of the largest scams out there. Investment managers of mutual an 401k funds retain the voting rights of the shares under management. Effectively locking most American's out of corporate governance. Ever notice when shills talk about the holy god given rights of shareholders they never talk about that?

Why shares instead of cash? How will issuing shares in Airbnb help people struggling to find affordable accommodations in the city where they live/work?

Airbnb isn't even public, so the shares are essentially worthless unless someone takes on the expense and hassle of pooling them together and finding a private buyer. And even then, there's a major imbalance of power because private buyers are usually wealthy individuals/funds and know that the seller is desperate for cash.

The issue with a policy like this is it would limit the size of corporations to a few dozen people.

Someone does something bad at a F100 company? 10,000 employees lose their jobs supporting their family.

Corporations can, however, have sanctions imposed on them, like Huawei or ZTE. Perhaps we ought to explore placing companies that routinely lie to consumers on the BIS Entity List, and bar other American companies from doing business with them until they change their ways.

How hard would it be to write laws that punish companies in ways that will shape their behavior, like we do with people? All you have to do is take away their ability to business in your jurisdiction. That's corporate jail.

Not disagreeing with you but I believe Thoreau said that about philanthropy.

> There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.

imho, this strengthens the OP’s use of the quote.

successful Tech founders are especially guilty of producing what they strive in vain to relieve.

perhaps, but I think Thoreau is talking primarily about the risk of producing a systemic dependency, i.e. the "teach a man to fish" philosophy. He was an ardent believer in self-sufficiency and prioritized individual autonomy over maximizing group benefit. He has a lot of great things to say but you could argue their relevancy and context is often misrepresented.

Our current problem is the growth of "make sure all ways a man can fish has to pay rent to me first".

> allow call-center employees in third-world countries to pretend

I agree companies should be forced to tell the truth to their customers, but in all cases where they're asking for details about the customer service rep? That could go weird places.

If a caller demanded to know the rep's HIV status, we wouldn't insist the company disclose it. We'd probably demand they didn't. Honesty is important, ok, but the customer has no reasonable need to know that. So, ok, it's not as simple as "tell the customer everything." There are some judgment calls the company has to make about what's important to disclose and what is irrelevant. The service rep's race, religion, medical history, or sexual orientation are probably not up for discussion. Why not national origin?

This isn't just about fairness to the rep, but the majority of customers need the company to hold this line too. If some portion of the population strongly believes that foreign call centers are lower quality, are you going to get the best possible answers on a survey if you say, "this was a foreign call center, how was the quality?"

Disclosing irrelevant details can sabotage collection of unbiased information on call quality.

If customers as a whole want improved service quality, they'll want the company to be able to collect unbiased post-call survey results.

If call centers in country X are all terrible, unbiased surveys will reveal that. If it's really about training, and there are good and bad call centers in several different countries, unbiased surveys will reveal that too.

I know passions run deep on this one, and it's a hard case, but this one seems a little more complicated than the others.

I think it's more

"Hello, it's [fake name they can't quite pronounce chosen to be a common UK name] calling you from [company they don't work for but who ordered a phone advertising service], it's lovely weather here in [small UK town they mispronounced badly and where it's terrible weather today], how are you today? ... Great, we are calling about your [account with company you don't have an account with] ..."

It's basically all lies, and all unnecessary, trying to win some trust as part of a marketing exercise. Bleurgh.

>If a caller demanded to know the rep's HIV status, we wouldn't insist the company disclose it.

Because it has no bearing.

I think a more interesting question is if they wanted to know health information that would be relevant, such as specific mental abnormalities that would influence a person's ability to lie. Then again, even that question is moot because when you ask someone if they are a liar, the truth tellers and liars both answer no.

Current location matters because of laws. If the other individual is in the US, I have a better idea of what recourse I have if my information is misused.

And I don't think this can be dismissed outright as contrived and unreasonable, especially in some cases like doing business in China where IP is treated very differently

But if we use the excuse of the customer having a right to know the laws that bind whom they are talking to, gender and race become an interesting case as well. In a fair and just world, they shouldn't matter one bit. But given our current world, we know that the legal system is not applied to them equally. Racial and gender disparities in sentences can be off by a factor of 27 (this was a back of the napkin estimate I did some years ago based on sentencing data, and was based on the same crime, so it does not include any disparity in what charges are brought). Does a customer have a right to know that the person they are talking to is privileged when it comes to laws being applied and thus has less disincentive to engage in illegal behavior?

>If some portion of the population strongly believes that foreign call centers are lower quality, are you going to get the best possible answers on a survey if you say, "this was a foreign call center, how was the quality?"

Self reports are one of the worst forms of data collection, so it is a bit sad that so many companies still depend only among it when rating their employees. More objective metrics have massive problems with being gamed, but at least they are more objective.

Declining to tell someone something is not the same as lying to them. And declining to tell the customer "I am HIV positive" is not the same as declining to tell them impersonal information.

You may or may not be aware but there are companies that actively instruct their international call center personnel to tell customers "My name is Sally and I live in Fort Worth Texas, right near you" when none of that is true.

I think this is an important distinction that the parent comment failed to address and which destroys the premise of their entire argument.

> If a caller demanded to know the rep's HIV status

This seems very far from the OP's thesis that in our culture there is a normalization of lying by people trying to sell us things.

The service rep's race, religion, medical history, or sexual orientation are probably not up for discussion. Why not national origin?

National origin is different than where the call center is located. A company is under no legal or (in my opinion) moral obligation not to “discriminate” when it comes to choosing which country to locate their call center. I

Some part of the population is always going to use deception and weakness of others.

I don't think there is a "general fix". You just have to constantly show them where the boundaries are and the cost of crossing them.

Taking advantage of the expectation, that a general fix is possible, is what gets Charlatans and Panderers into power.

That said, despite the fact that it has been easier to take advantage of the weaknesses in the population faster and at scales never before, (imagine a shark, overnight, growing more efficient at hunting/doubling its kill count and hunting grounds, and that trait spreading to all sharks by the next day) that same pace causes natural born predators to bump into each other more, clashing more frequently, expending more resources/energy in empire defense.

There is no free lunch, even to the mindlessly ambitious douchebags of society. They put up an appearance that there is.

> that same pace causes natural born predators to bump into each other more, clashing more frequently, expending more resources/energy in empire defense.

And that's a problem in this case, because it's not like any of the predators in ad industry actually dies. They just deliver less money for the parties that employed/contracted them.

Advertising has a different dynamic than regular predation, because in a saturated market, effort of any party serves only to cancel out the efforts of every other party. It's a zero-sum game that can consume near-infinite amount of energy and resources. Now think of all the man hours, electricity, fossil fuels, papers, paints, toxic chemicals and human dignity - all wasted in a zero sum game - and tell me again that advertisers "expending more resources/energy in empire defense" is a good thing. It's the opposite - it'll eat our economy and kill us through side effects of all the resource wastage.

>And that's a problem in this case, because it's not like any of the predators in ad industry actually dies.

Hmm, I'm not saying that you unintentionally found a solution here.

I agree that this is a widespread problem in many areas but I do think there’s a strong argument that bots are worth singling out in the context of social networking, where the bots are often used to steer public opinion in non-obvious ways with no clear ownership. It’s one thing if Samsung’s support chat-bot is misleading but that at least is obviously linked to the company in question whereas, say, the fake Twitter accounts complaining about Nike using photo stolen from real people aren’t easily associated with whoever is pushing that campaign and the intention is clearly to shift public opinion. There are good arguments for preserving anonymity but banning misrepresentation seems more defensible.

(I mentioned the Nike thing not because this is limited to conservatives but because that was the most recent example which came to mind: there were a bunch of well-promoted tweets from accounts using profile pictures of attractive young women which a quick tineye search showed were long-running Instagram users under different names)

The other issue with bots is whether a company's support is bot-only or human.

Free choice and all, but without disclosure (pre-purchase) a company shouldn't be able to "cost manage" their support function by using an algorithm fronted by chatbots.

Yeah, I'd also back laws banning a lot of the no-recourse situations companies cost-minimize you into but that'd also want to account for, say, having you talk to people who are under strict instructions not to help you or tell you why.

(Once Verizon tried to charge me an ETF despite being a couple of years out of contract. The phone support was horrible and I thought it might have just been an English fluency issue but then I called the executive office and the person who fixed my bill just casually volunteered that the people in the first-tier call centers cannot in any way reverse charges or escalate to people who can, and aren't allowed to say that. They understood the question but their jobs were literally on the line if they told you that they couldn't help.)

Should they have to disclose that their phone system has an IVR before every purchase as well? That they use a third-party logistics provider to handle returns?

Utilizing algorithmic-only customer support seems far more impactful than those technologies, from a customer standpoint.

As Google and PayPal have shown, it's generally a cluster$&#* (at best), even with state of the art technologies.

Furthermore, it provides a fundamental shift in the power dynamic by removing the possibility of whistleblowers and ethical counterpressure. You literally have management as the sole arbiter of algorithmic settings, with (currently) no legal disclosure requirements as to any internals.

That seems pretty screwed up from a free-market, transparency perspective.

Nah, those with an IVR should be summarily shot.

Kidding, of course. Mostly.

Disclosing IVRs before purchase would be a good start. Preferably with a legally mandated recognizable logo that customers can quickly learn to associate with terrible support.

Only if they pretend that you're interacting with real people. An IVR is often bad customer service but it's clear what you're dealing with.

The problem with norms: bad actors don't care about them.

Norms and regulation/law can work together. Either alone are insufficient, I think.

Strong international norms and regulations are probably needed as well. As we clean up our domestic affairs, we create more space for hostile state actors to fill.

>> The problem with norms: bad actors don't care about them.

This is a very important observation. The world most of us want is one influenced by norms we work together to define & change over time. Some see this as an opportunity to exploit for personal gain and we eventually get imperfect regulation that tries to reflect what we originally intended, or worse, is enacted by the same bad actors to coerce the bad behaviours we resisted in the first place.

I see this all the time in growing companies:

1. culture dictates expected behaviour

2. company grows

3. culture weakens

4. norms get violated (intentionally or not)

5. process gets decreed to address transgressions

6. everyone looses the shared benefit/responsibility of autonomy

7. GOTO 1

It seems then, that it starts with the infrastructure / process. If the infrastructure supports abuse freely, it will be abused. There will always those who try to find a way regardless..

The "root" of the problem is a tricky metaphor. It can be defined different ways, and the most abstract (ie, You can't swing at it) is often what people come up with.

How would you fix, at a general level, the overall human & corporate tendency to play loose with the truth? I mean, we're subtly dishonest all the time.

Implement a tax on advertising budgets and use it to fund an independent watchdog, a la CFPB.

To avoid capture, require all watchdog individuals to be masked / anonymized, with prosecution flowing through the DoJ.

In the US, at the core of that problem is the deception that corporations are "people" at a fundamental level. That fundamental untruth allows and essentially permits all the others.

Bots? Just a manifestation of the above.

I'm having trouble seeing the connection between these two issues. If we didn't treat corporations as people, how would that stop companies from using bots?

Citizens have a right to free speech. Corporations do not, unless they also happen to be people.

Do groups of people have a right to free speech or just individuals acting alone?

How would that change the status quo for using bots? Without free speech would corporations that aren't also people just be completely disallowed from conveying information, or is there some particular law you think should be passed but is prevented by the first amendment?

Could corporations get around the restrictions you have in mind by subcontracting speech to people?

So it's okay if a person uses bots to deceptively call people, it just shouldn't be okay for corporations to do it, because they shouldn't be treated as people?

Not disagreeing but at least the Australian ad authority is actually dealing with the Samsung case.

Basically they've warrantied their phones for chlorine or salt water immersion now here in Australia. They won't be refusing warranty claims for related damage.

Minor PSA: If you ever immerse your IP68 rated device in anything other than water, make sure to give it a rinse in water ASAP. Preferably not too high pressure water either.

The root problem is the identity problem on the internet.

Having anon accounts is good for HN but as soon as money is involved we need a structure that solves the identity for all people inside the transaction.

Technology has to become 1984 levels to ID users at all times. Better to have an identity relationship with a structure or body that you can meet with in real life, like a bank. A mix of tech and human relations is required for a sane identity relationship with this governing body and therefore everybody you do business with on the net.

Lying goes back to manageable levels once the identity is linked to someone's real life reputation.

Maybe a form of public shaming and accountability could help?

This is a minuscule experiment I am running: https://gitlab.com/simonebrunozzi/dark-companies

>allow call-center employees in third-world countries to pretend (even sometimes though elaborate lying) that they are located in the same country as you.

I have a friend who worked at a call centre located in asia for an American company. They were threatened with termination if customers heard them speaking in their native language and the training for the job consisted mostly of faking an American way of speaking as much as possible.

We also “allow” the government to use deception. This entire thread appears to be focused on mostly inconsequential annoyances like adtech as if this is somehow the worst thing in the world, and the only savior can be the state finding the “root” to regulate and fix as if that wouldn’t include fixing itself somehow.

I agree, and I believe things like massive boycotts, worker-owned cooperatives, and stronger unions are the answer, along with an independent news media.

I know the normal reaction is more fines and regulation, but then you're using bureaucracy and court cases to fight people who are masters of bureaucracy and court cases.

Advertisment is the root of many today’s time. Marketers could argue that it is just about helping people to find the right product or service, but this is another lie. Maybe a lie you have tell yourself if you are working in that field.

Great. What do you propose?

How do you propose to fix dishonesty on the general level?

True. I would like to add, however, that just because they're not striking at the root doesn't mean they should stop hacking at the branch. It's still an evil branch, to use Thoreau's metaphor.

You're absolutely right about normalizing lies and deception. You know what normalizes lying faster than anything else? Requiring that people lie about the evidence of their own eyes if they're to be accepted into polite company. We've built a society in which lying is compulsory in certain domains. Why on Earth would anyone expect the lying to stay within those domains once the taboo against dishonesty in general is broken?

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