Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlazos | Hacker News Reader

The usual, credit agencies ARE JUST AS BAD AS WE THOUGHT. They exchange all of our information with each other, and their security is so absolutely horrible that a 20 something hacker in Vietnam who just learned English could stay in their systems for years and build a business off of reading queries directly from these databases. It’s actually insane.

View on HN

(Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

The existence of these databases, especially given how insecure they are is, of course, a real national security threat, but the lack of reaction from the government is telling.

Yet everyone is freaking out and moralizing about nonfinancial data voluntarily given to Facebook. If only the credit bureaus kept our financial and identity data as Facebook kept your list of favorite movies and your selfies.

Facebook sell your favourite movies, friends, political views and anything else they know about you to advertisers. it's a very similar business model.

They actually don't, unless you define selling as they allow advertisers to select what demographics/attributes their ads target. But the actual data stays on the Facebook servers. If you're referring to the apps having access to user data, that was not selling at all, but instead a permission originally granted by users by probably forgotten about. Basically, unless you contort the definition of selling to a very different meaning, that's simply not true.

And if you do use that definition of selling, then everyone is selling your data. All the politicians who decry tech companies are selling your data using the same definition. Every advertiser, retail store, bank, basically every large business offers other businesses a way to access a specific subset of their users.

Yes, that's how I define selling in the context of that sentence, as the only other way to read 'they sell your favourite movies' is the wilful misinterpretation that they actually sell movies, which would be a non-issue.

I think it's pretty clear they sell your preferences to advertisers and let apps misuse your data (there have been plenty of scandals where people didn't understand what apps would get).

This is emphatically not the business model of most businesses large or small.

I think I see the confusion between us. You don't see the difference between selling data to a company, and selling ad space where the advertiser can choose for what demographics it shows up for.

Let me try to make it more clear. Do you see the difference between "hey Chase Bank, do you want to buy this file containing data about grey-area's interests, age, political stance, credit score, purchasing habits, etc." versus "hey Chase Bank, do you want to put an ad on my website that is only shown to people with credit scores above 600 and are interested in savings accounts"?

If they both seem the same to you, then I don't think your perspective is one that a reasonable person would take. If you do see the difference, then Facebook is doing the latter, but the word "selling data" conjures the former, which you do recognize as a different matter.

I'm going to ignore the nonsensical definition you gave of selling data = selling movies, being the only other definition of selling you could imagine, in hopes that it was just an oversight.

Yeah, no. They sell the ability to target groups of people based on these characteristics. They don't sell data on individuals.

That is because the surveillance bureaus form part of the government. We have a microkernel government.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com