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Comment by pyentropy | Hacker News Reader

IMHO, I'm glad Microsoft is not part of this. It's not about profits, it's about data monopoly.

Writing a modern OS is almost impossible from scratch, but there's nothing preventing you from hiring enough people and making Windows or Azure.

But the problem with Facebook and Google is that they started by scraping stuff for free and without limitations, but if you try to do the same thing with them they bite you with Terms of service, paid data graphs and API quotas. How do you build a index of businesses/venues and people? No matter how many people you hire you cannot achieve the same snowball / network effect.

Instead of breaking them up, make them release open data.

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Uh hello, Microsoft has a ton of telemetry setup in Windows. Microsoft’s greatest achievement is their data collection and how no one cares.

Facebook did not “scrape stuff for free”. People willingly gave FB their information.

People gave Facebook my stuff for free.

RMS explains this much more eloquently than I do. He doesn't have a Facebook account, but he's all over Facebook, without any control, desire, or influence.

Many people set up Facebook accounts to have some control over this. Without an account, I can have nasty things about me on Facebook. To have controls over that, I need to agree to a contract with Facebook which gives away other stuff.

When I joined Facebook a few years ago (so many years after Facebook was launched), I was quite stunned to see the friend suggestions quite neatly sorted from people I knew a lot to people I barely knew.

Their shadow profile on me was very solid, it seems.

I've seen his explanation, but I don't follow the concept of data ownership being expressed. I can be in my friends' conversations, my company's management discussions, even the newspaper without consenting to it - why is Facebook different?

Because it’s for-profit?

The newspaper is also for profit and while commerical speech may have more restrictions (truth in advertising) they aren't barred from those areas. Not a fan of Facebook but the objection appears to be pure novelty bias because it hasn't been as normalized as the old ways.

How was Facemash (Hot or Not) developed (pics of Harvard girls never used the site)? How did they get website traffic data from their like button without visitors using Facebook? Also, how is my grandma part of their database because all her grandchildren have her in their phone contacts?

And because of C.A. FB can probably claim they need to close the graph so that sort of thing doesn't happen again

But yeah, drives me nuts. Innovation happens due to the initial openness... then everyone closes down and takes their ball and goes home

Totally open data is likely a non-starter, but they could be forced to interoperate with other suppliers of comparable services under an open standard. There's no inherent reason why Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. couldn't all be Fediverse instances, with shared feeds at least for publicly-broadcasted activities (as opposed to the private data that CA was collecting).

That means your friend list includes my data. I don’t want my data shared between other companies.

One of windows' competitors is free, theyll never have an os monopoly

Windows 10 telemetry?

What about it? This is about anti-trust and I don't think Microsoft has a monopoly on telemetry...

I just see it as part of the data monopoly. A near impossible aspect of the OS you cannot turn off that robs you of privacy.

These companies did "release open data". It's called Cambridge Analytica. Look it up.

So case closed.

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