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Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

There are many motels, but Facebook has a monopoly on facebook accounts. If you could make a facebook account somewhere else, you could "take your business elsewhere".

Last I checked, FB actively banned using their APIs to build a competing product. I wish the government would make it mandatory to offer federation if you had, say, more than a million customers. But alas, governments rarely do what's convenient for customers.

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How would you prevent a Cambridge analytica style data "breach"?

You make explicit that all data that people enter, they enter for purposes of sharing. At the same time, you ban creating profiles with data that has not been explicitly shared. IMO:

- Make a telefone-book style listing, or searching for "all metalheads < 25 near Chicago" where people entered that into their profiles -> OK

- Tracking users on your site -> OK

- Tracking users on third party sites, and then aggregating this data, so you can see "people who searched for baby carrages" or "people who bought diapers with their credit card" -> not OK

- Having some kind of database where people could concievably look up what user tqi purchased, searched, what their political affiliation is (when not made public) -> not OK (unless you have extreme auditibility, four-eye principle, and so on)

"You make explicit that all data that people enter, they enter for purposes of sharing."

I think the data captured by CA was also entered for the purposes of sharing, (often) limited to friends and friends of friends. I think the crux of this all is that as a society we haven't really established how those rights are transferred. If I share my email address with a friend, can they share it with their contact management app? I'm not sure how you create a consistent policy in a federated model.

The German Facebook clone back in the day was called StudiVZ which means "Student's directory". This was before social media and was more of a social network. Everything you put in there you do because you want it to be public, like your number in a telefone directory. It was almost a pure platform for self-presentation, like MySpace or LinkedIn.

I'm well aware of "more is different" aka the dialectic transform of quantity in quality. Lots of data that in individually innocent can be problematic if somebody amasses it. But especially for this reason I think it is not good to have these kind of semi-public spaces where the data is public and the only protection is it is cumbersome to collect. Public data should be clearly public, and private data should be clearly private, and the UX should be really clear so people know what is happening.

(By the way, I'm not even sure CA was a "scandal" or that it was bad for FB. I think the only effect was that FB used it to justify locking down their API more.)

I had an economist friend of mine suggest this a few years ago in a conversation (I don't think it was a novel idea of his, it's just the first time I heard it). At the time I thought it was ridiculous and disagreed. But I've really started to come around to liking the idea over time.

That's pretty silly. Should I be able to use Amazon APIs to host reviews for my competing ecommerce site? Or be able to proxy user search requests to google and then intersperse my own advertisements in the results for my web search service?

I'm not the person you're responding to, but I would say unequivocally and unironically, yes! The end result is more competition, lower prices, and more options for the end consumer. Sure the raw idea of this mechanism is a little naive and could be refined, but the outcomes you paint sound totally reasonable to me... think of this as a creative way to apply a new kind of tax to the criminally undertaxed big tech behemoths like Amazon and Google.

You are allowed to do that(as far as I understand scraping legality), but google/amazon/facebook are also well within their rights to blacklist your IPs, or implement other methods to prevent scraping of their IP(intellectual property in this case).

If you come up with a cool service on top of Amazon's API, should Amazon be allowed to use your APIs to scrape your service data and use it in their offering?

If you get above <threshold> users, sure why not? It doesn't have to be free, maybe some sort of auditing service could determine a "fair" price. But it would be open without the possibility of shutting it down in the future unless maybe Amazon themselves ditches that API internally.

If it’s so I can access my own data then yes is should be able to.

Google isn’t remotely comparable, and I believe Amazon has APIs for their store fronts / merchants (still can’t access reviews you leave)

Amazon is infrastructure at this point. Everybody should have access to it. Jeff Bezos won capitalism, give him a medal and let him explore space.

Why do we treat government services and certain large private services separately? Why are government publications public domain, private publications not? Why does free speach apply to the government, but not to corporations? Why can't we treat amazon like a utility?

I believe the difference is because in the past people fought for these concessions from the state. They decided for example it would be sensible that the government should not restrict free speach. And before, they decided not to take feudalism as a given but to democratically elect their government. I know I'm being a bit dramatic, but there's no reason people couldn't get together and demand these kind of concessions from powerful corporations, too. Access to Amazon's product API is really the least example of what would change.

I'm thinking Facebook should be subject to an anti-trust investigation and breakup.

> governments rarely do what's convenient for customers

or what's in the long term best interest of their citizens let alone the rest of the world. Silly humans.

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