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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

This really needs to go farther. As a purchaser of any product, I should not need to create an Internet account with the manufacturer, in order to use or continue to use a product. Once I buy it, it should be mine. I don't want to have this ongoing relationship with your company. This trend of companies making you tether yourselves to them in order to use a product you paid for has to end. I'm not a huge fan of regulating tech, but need some kind of "Right To Use" law that says once you buy something, it's yours and you don't need to connect to the manufacturer to use it, and the manufacturer can't revoke your right to use it.

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I can't be banned by my power company or my water company. Perhaps if Facebook wants their login to be treated as an essential service for multiple products, they should be regulated like a utility...

Or you know stop doing that.

> they should be regulated like a utility

I expect that's what they want. Oauth logins could be regulated by government in a similar fashion to mobile spectrums and it won't be easy for competitors to pop up.

"I can't be banned by my power company or my water company"

Los Angeles is breaking new boundaries in this arena!

the world famous disruption, now literally

I'd love some more info, or a link if you would. This interests me.

Well, we already have Google fiber and Google phone service. So there are some utilities you can get banned from because of happy birthday playing in the background of a YouTube video or something...

There is a need to begin calling out Facebook and Google employees directly for their role in harming society, especially because they seem ready to rise up whenever one of their peers is mistreated.

What would be your strategy for holding a mirror to these people and to make these jobs undesirable?

Is there a need for that?

Why don’t we call out bank employees for all the fraud and deception leading up to the 2008 crash? Car makers and oil companies employees for polluting the earth? Farmers for allowing run off into rivers? Pharma employees for relentlessly jacking up prices and pill mills poising countless people?

The reality is most employees have virtually zero impact on the direction of their company. The Zuckerbergs of this world will retreat to their private island estates in Hawaii till any backlash blows over.

If only employees had some way of joining their collective voices to create an actual power structure that could bargain with executives and shareholders.

Probably a bad idea though, we should just keep assuming that the founders lucky enough to reach critical mass will do the right thing for the world even when they are incentivized not to.

>Why don’t we call out bank employees for all the fraud and deception leading up to the 2008 crash? Car makers and oil companies employees for polluting the earth?

a lot of people complain about those all the time. In Iceland they even put them into prison.

>The reality is most employees have virtually zero impact on the direction of their company

I don't think that's true. Software workers, in particular at those large companies in senior positions wield quite a lot of influence. It's right that they're not owners of the firm, but they're in short supply and they command a lot of power. That said, even your average lowly developer has a very simple choice to have more than zero impact. Don't help them build these systems.

This won’t get positive traction here but whatever: I was in an elevator in Austin a few years ago for a conference.

Older guy, mid 50’s maybe, gets on and says “oh are you a googler?” Me: “Are you? Him: “Yeah I’m in XXXX group” Me: “That’s disgusting, Google is an evil company and you should quit”.

Dude was visibly shocked, and I got off the elevator and never saw him again. If more people told the employees of surveillance capitalism company’s just how terrible they are for working for them they’d have a lot harder time recruiting.

I feel like the tide is shifting.

Original Google said “Don’t be evil”, and the employees stood up for the integrity of the company when needed.

Now, Alphabet as the large company did not bring over that motto, and in fact Google has now removed it.

And if the things we see publicly are accurate, the employee’s faith in Google is shaken.

so you were a total dick to a random person and you're writing this story like you're the hero?

I believe that’s being rude for no actual reason.

There is a clear reason - to make them uncomfortable. Nobody forced them to work there, and it is obvious to everyone what kind of future they are building there. If you exchange your soul for a good paycheck, this is just what you get.

The alternative is "Oh, you work at Schutzstaffel? That's cool!". That he has done is morally correct.

Google has an absolute overabundance of people lining up to work for them. Telling the moral people that they should quit just results in a company filled with amoral people.

Agreed -- though likely to be a minority opinion on here unfortunately.

Although I do feel for those who began at Google when they still ascribed to the Don't Be Evil mantra -- at some point you have a responsibility to look around you and recognize the work you're doing has become part of the problem.

What are you even saying? Facebook and Google engineers are just writing code, just like (presumably) you. Very few of them make any key decisions, and most of them work on good things. For every engineer working on disallowing FB signout on oculus, there are 10 writing tools for small businesses to more easliy share their pages, helping people stay in contact with loved ones.

We (rightly) don't go after Northrop Grumman engineers when the US decides to bomb Yemen. Put down your pitchfork and show some compassion.

It’s always interesting when I see HN on the verge of grasping the importance of worker solidarity. Ironically by following political philosophies of “self” empowerment, tech workers have ceded all real power to their majority investors.

You’re both right, but your argument is one logical jump away from “they were just doing their jobs”

Compassion is the reverse of what you're thinking. If you make bombs in modern day you're a murderer. We have no active world war, no real threat to our borders, and any basic level of research shows those bombs are used for proxy wars over resources and land in foreign continents. If youre in a position to design bombs you're in a position to work anywhere else too. No excuses for behavior.

Rising totalitarian nation across the sea with an ever expanding military, infinite resources, and a desire to expand reach around the globe.

"JuSt StoP MakinG Bombss"

Provide evidence that were at any risk of WW3. In the U.S. Those bombs are exclusively used for proxy wars and are made in significant abundance to continue that "war". They're not for any other purpose. If your intent is actual defense, sure, but we don't have that reason.

Working for Google and Facebook is often a choice, with a highly desirable outcome. People rarely become engineers at Facebook because they just couldn't find a job at a different company.

Those engineers could decide to build similar tools at a company that does not aid, you know, genocide. Those engineers could also decide to not continue working for a company that normalizes mass surveillance.

When you decide to work on your awesome things at companies like Facebook and Google, you are propping up megacorps that harm society, and that's your choice.

Regarding compassion, I'm looking forward to the next mass walkout of Facebook engineers, condemning the spread of hate and violence that their employee enables.

I have a (good faith) question for you: since it seems as though many large corporations accumulate skeletons and incentivize negative behavior, is your position effectively against large corporations? Or is there a counterexample? Is this a complaint against the FB(/IG/SNAP/whatever) style feed, or do you feel this is endemic to any communication platform at scale?

Outside of the US, many (perhaps most) educated and politically-aware Westerners do look down on people involved in the Military-Industrial Complex.

Nobody civilized wants to "go after" them of course, but make no mistake - it's not something you'd want to brag about while overseas if you're trying to make friends.

This is true even in friendly places like Europe, Canada or Japan. Make of that what you will.

I find tech workers on HN, and other places, to be incredibly privileged and Entitled. Some of the responses you’re getting show it pretty clearly.

"I should not need to create an Internet account with the manufacturer, in order to use or continue to use a product. "

This is a nice sentiment, but probably not possible given the reality of the interconnected nature of everything. The tech generally 'needs' the internet to work.

The issues are:

1) FB requires your so-called 'real identity' which is something fundamentally different than an e-mail address.

2) Related to 1, they ban a lot, for various reasons. Those things nee to be disentangled.

I wonder if the US/DE regulators are going to be smart enough to do something specific because if their redress is too wide, their going to put a zillion businesses in a very grey area.

Thoughtful clarity would be nice.

Banning accounts that are the sole way a user has to access things they have 'purchased' should be made illegal. If that causes problems because it's also tied to a social media account, then that's an argument for social media companies keeping it separate.

Imagine if a car I'd bought stopped working because I stuck a 'Find my lost cat' poster up somewhere it wasn't supposed to be.

A car is not a service. It doesn't need an account.

Most things these days are service-related and absolutely need 'accounts'.

Like your XBox.

Occulus will invariably require some kind of 'account'.

'Accounts' are not evil.

XBox and Occulus have no absolutely no reason to be services. Requiring accounts for no reason is anti-consumer and therefore evil.

Of course online stores require accounts, but those are not required to use the hardware.

There is nothing anti-privacy about an 'account'. Someone having an arbitrary email address doesn't constitute a breach of privacy.

Downloading games is greatly enhanced by accounts.

Playing most games require accounts.

Banning cheaters effectively requires accounts.

It's 100% perfectly fine and there is nothing wrong with it.

The hyperbole here gets really tiring after a while.

> Playing most games require accounts.

No it does not. Most games are not multiplayer games and don't require accounts.

> Downloading games is greatly enhanced by accounts.

It's greatly enhanced by accounts _with the application vendor_ not the device manufacturer. I'd be quite upset if AMD required an account to be able to download Steam games. I _was_ quite upset when a(n offline only) game I bought on Steam required a Games for Windows Live account I didn't was.

> There is nothing anti-privacy about an 'account'. Someone having an arbitrary email address doesn't constitute a breach of privacy.

I said anti-consumer, not anti-privacy. Online only is also cancer, which is what requiring an account effectively is.

> Like your XBox

But you absolutely should NOT need an account to use your Xbox.

You don't need one. But it's extremely useful in most cases, necessary for many things (playing other players, game accounts) and absolutely nothing privacy-invading about it. Giving someone a random e-mail has nothing to with identity. You're giving someone a random set of characters, so that if you chose to re-engage with that entity, you have some way of doing that.

> Giving someone a random e-mail has nothing to with identity. You're giving someone a random set of characters, so that if you chose to re-engage with that entity, you have some way of doing that.

...until the entity wants forms of payment. Then you've got to keep that random sequence of characters for your life unless you're willing to part ways with your purchase.

No, your statement doesn't reflect the reality that companies do treat emails as identities.

If you're really concerned about it, you can use a VISA without your name on it.

Even though we all of that choice, almost none of us care to do it.

Finally, it has nothing to do with control over hardware.

My comment wasn't against accounts (although I strongly suspect that I think that the kinds of things that should require accounts is much smaller than you do), it was against accounts that get arbitrarily cut off, or cut off because the account for accessing your media is tied to all kinds of other things that have nothing to do with accessing your media and for which you can be summarily disconnected with little to no recourse.

> The tech generally 'needs' the internet to work.

Most of the time, that "need" is entirely artificial - or at least not the only way to design the device.

I wonder one motivation (besides harvesting more user data) is that the Oculus devices are sold at a break-even point or even at a loss.

So Facebook is essentially subsidizing the cost of an Oculus headset initially and making up the profit on ads data. Similar to the console business of selling the hardware at or below cost and making it up in the games sales.

The Quest is a game console. How would you get content on it without an account? e.g, you can't buy an online PS4 game without an account.

The same way you should be able to get content on any other game console or device without an account. Bring your own games.

... in the old days, things were distributed on punch paper.

... then floppy disks became an excellent medium of distribution.

... then CDs became prevalent.

... later DVDs came along and provided lots of distributable content.

... some games distributed content with DVDs.

These days though... there should be nothing wrong with distributing your content via a USB or microSD card.

Other than, you know, that whole "oh my gawds my copyrites waaaaaa"

> These days though... there should be nothing wrong with distributing your content via a USB or microSD card.

Or just a file. No need to produce more plastic trash.

An Oculus account which is in no way tied to your facebook account unless you choose to do so

Sure, that makes sense. I was responding to the grandparent post which argued for no accounts at all.

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