Comment by TimSchumann | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TimSchumann | Hacker News Reader

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> It taught me a valuable lesson not to build my entire business on someone else's platform.

This sounds eerily similar to what happened to a close friend of mine, and that's 100% the right takeaway from the situation.

> My wife runs a small business on Etsy and it's just as bad. They make random code changes, which bumps listings up or down and you suddenly have no orders for weeks at a time.

Same as above, different friend, but again Etsy.

> What's even scarier is if a handful of companies run everything we use online. Will I suddenly not be able to get a home loan for a decade because of an account closure?

And that's why I'm in favor of strong individual privacy laws, and corresponding enforcement of said laws. Because 'I've got nothing to hide' only works so long as your values/goals are in line with everyone else in the system you're operating in.

The second that changes, good luck and godspeed.

Thanks for the great read, and... I dunno just validating your view of things.

>> I'm in favor of strong individual privacy laws

I support such laws too, but I wouldn't expect them to really change this. I think what we're seeing is more of a monopoly problem than anything else, even if violating privacy is a part of how they pull it off.

It's very hard to prove that a company that does, in theory, have access to data is not storing it or looking at it. Even accidentally. I just finished explaining all this to someone who freaked out about a Facebook post they saw about how Facebook was starting to collect information about everything you do off-Facebook. I had them show me what they meant, and it appears to just be every app that integrates with Facebook comments or allows Facebook sign-in as an option, etc.

The problem is one Facebook naturally got because of it's success: everyone has good reasons to want to work within their ecosystem. So they get tons of data on everyone. You can inconvenience yourself and refuse to ever visit a service that might share data with Facebook. But honestly: who's going to find that practical and do it? And if Facebook ignores the setting and "accidentally" captures all this data, and I suspect they're misusing it, how do I really get an investigation and more than a slap on the wrist for them?

It's messy to be a platform that provides a service and a consumer of that service that competes with your other consumers. At a previous job of mine we made a conscious decision not to do that for fear it would hurt our core business to ruin relationships with our customers. The problem here is Amazon just doesn't fear that. And I can't say they should. But the root problem seems to me to be more of a monopoly problem than a privacy problem.

The American idea used to include anti-monopoly rules. Granted Amazon is not a monopoly, but the idea was to keep businesses small (and govt small) so no single superior entity would reign abusively on individuals. And that would make the federation stronger.

Maybe it’s time to revive it. Google, Apple, Amazon, all cause issues because they are too big and haven’t been broken up (or menaces of) for way too long.

We’ve scratched antitrust laws in 9/11, when Microsoft was recognized guilty but never sanctioned, because the domination of USA after 9/11 was important. But maybe that led to two decades of really huge corporations, and a bit more liquidity in the market (choice of platforms, etc) could be nice.

This is a legislative/governmental issue not a technical one. In jurisdictions where privacy and anticompetitive laws are enforced (EU) regulators have the ability to regulate with fines of real consequence which is not the case in the US. It does not always lead to perfect outcomes but it does give greater protection to most people.

The 'I got nothing to hide' is when discussing law enforcement surveilence? It is funny how fear of the "police state" is more or less irrelevant now vs early 2000s and private companies are the main problem. It is hard to predict the future.

Yeah that may have not been the correct phrase to turn there. I guess in this context it's more about personal ownership of data. Which at this point in time, is 100% trust based with Amazon and 0% tech based.

I don't think that's something people, even many very technologically knowledgeable people, are aware of.

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