Comment by salawat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by salawat | Hacker News Reader

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I'm still waiting for the inevitable shitstorm that'll ensue when someone "innovates" a Relationship Management platform that is effectively a Shunning-as-a-Service (Read: Online Presence Surveillance and Data Broker interface) offering and suddenly discovers they've re-invented corporate organized blacklisting, which has been illegal for years. Yes, technically only for employment purposes, but the practice is generally abhored wherever it rears it's ugly head outside of that that comes down to just defending yourself from bad actors, where bad actors is defined as "Those seeking to cause direct harm for financial or other gain." Things that aren't just able to be chocked up to "having a controversial viewpoint".

I really wish people would wake up to the fact that right now, computing is still in its "enumerative innovation" phase where the computer will get thrown at every human problem under the sun to see what sticks, or what causes complete outrage and cannot be allowed.

>I'm still waiting for the inevitable shitstorm that'll ensue when someone "innovates" a Relationship Management platform that is effectively a Shunning-as-a-Service

This had existed, for Twitter at least. Apparently it shut down last year. I had ended up on several blocklists or at least one commonly shared once because I'm blocked by a good 20-30% of Twitter's blue checkmarked journalists that I've never once interacted with or Tweeted at before.

https://blocktogether.org/

I could easily see being randomly blacklisted/blocked with no real understanding as to why you are blocked other than some well-connected person that you peeved off once had added to a shared blacklist. This likely already happens.

It's funny you should mention that. A few years back, the operation of the shared Twitter ban list used by the Twitter left was, ah, slightly disrupted by the fact that it was being run by a British person who thought the Data Protection Act didn't apply to them and eventually received a polite official letter pointing out how completely wrong they are. (For context, their justification for why it didn't apply were that they were storing the data on a US service which had no contractual obligation to protect the data, and the list contained just about every kind of information categorized as sensitive under the DPA in the comments field... sexual orientation, political affiliation, all sorts.)

Anyway, I remember pointing out at the time that the Data Protection Act had been used to shut down corporate blacklisting efforts run by people with very good lawyers and much cleverer attempted loopholes than theirs, and that their chances of somehow finding a loophole where everyone else had failed were basically zero.

>corporate organized blacklisting, which has been illegal for years.

Does that mean Uber and Lyft sharing lists of drivers that have been banned from their platforms is illegal?

Depends why they've been banned, probably.

Corporate blacklisting is illegal, but there have been substantial carve-outs in the name of safety. DISA [1] is a great example of this - fail a drug test and you're banned from about 10% of the US economy for 7 years.

[1] https://disa.com/why-disa

Uber and Lyft drivers are technically external contractors. Not employees. As far ask I know, there's no law about sharing bad contractors names.

In some jurisdictions, they are legally employees. ‘Move fast and break laws’ doesn't work everywhere.

right. If this were illegal then so would be BBB, or Angie's List, or Yelp?

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