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Comment by nerdjon | Hacker News Reader

I cannot believe anyone in these comments is defending Facebook on this.

Should the hospitals have been better so this sensitive data doesn't get to Facebook? Yes.

But we cannot excuse the privacy invasive practices of Facebook and Google (I would be shocked if google was not also getting this data somehow).

And this is not just hospital data, it is certain sensitive apps (I really don't need or want Facebook to know every time I open Grindr), nearly every single thing we do these companies find a way to find out because they weasel their way in by offering some helpful feature that a developer would want to use.

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It is a bit sad to see the smartest engineers in the world all working towards implementing and maintaining the largest spying apparatus in history.

We should be focusing on learning from and highlighting people who are working to make the world a better place - and not focusing on employees from these companies. Any online news aggregator could institute a policy to not promote products or services of these companies. Unfortunately, many startups are operating with the hope that these companies acquire them, and so they're all to happy to continue extending this spying apparatus even further into other domains.

It's not a "spy apparatus". It's an ad company... and people from all over the world use these services because it does make their lives easier.

I have turned off I think hundreds of ad targeting switches in Facebook, Google, Windows, and LinkedIn, and despite the incessant passive-aggressive warnings about how ads will be "less relevant", I don't find them to be worse.

I hope you're not one of the weirdos who likes to contradict people and say we are all fooling ourselves and the algorithm knows all.

> It is a bit sad to see the smartest engineers in the world all working towards implementing and maintaining the largest spying apparatus in history.

It is inevitable when society promotes "fiduciary duty" and "I got mine" as apex values for corporates and individuals, respectively. Unfettered selfishness cannot get to a globally optimal solution, despite what any free market zealots may tell you.

The collective good is out of fashion - it has been for a long time, TBH, but now it is unapologetically so.

Are the best ones doing this? Or is it just sociopathic ones?

I have to add something to this.

This post is 45 minutes old and is almost now on page 2 of hacker news. Shit like this has become the norm! We don't think about it anymore. That is a huge problem. We cannot allow this to be the normal!

Ultimately we are the ones that built these tools. Use them.

I know the post rank isn't everything, but people just seem to not care anymore. We should be the ones that care the most because we actually understand (at least more of it) that this is happening in the first place and how it works. But also the dangers of things like this being moved to server side and completely hidden if nothing is done.

Unfortunately, all of the world's richest people seem pretty set on getting rid of privacy as a concept altogether.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s...

>Once in a while I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. Nowhere I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.

Mostly because government's don't do shit to stop them, and even when they do, facebook makes millions from that data, and is then fined a few percents of the money earned.

Fines for a single act like this, should be multiple times higher than whatever posible income they could get by gathering data like this.

It saddens me that we need the government to step in on cases like this.

Why has invading users privacy become normal? While Facebook and Google are the largest, it has become common that smaller companies are doing this to pad their bottom line.

As developers we should be pushing back on this. Not using these tools from Facebook and Google that just grow their grip on the web. The tools that invade user privacy in completely invisible ways.

I'm not sure if the developers pushing back is the answer.... it's like a mcdonalds burger-flipper pushing back on mcdonalds shitty meat.

I usually don't believe in regulation, but here is an obvious case for regulation... Does company/app legitimately need data X for the app/service to work? No? Then it's not allowed to collect, store and resell that data. If it does, it should be fined way more, than the data is worth. Did they collect the data for one thing (eg. location data for playing pokemon go) and are using it for another (ad targeting)... agian, a huge fine.

Yeah I guess, I am not against regulation. And it is clearly needed.

It is just more being sad we are at this point.

> It saddens me that we need the government to step in on cases like this.

Every time I see this I chuckle. The first public companies ever created had just two lines of business: selling drugs and selling slaves.

The only reason they ever stopped, was because government stepped in. The expectation that developers can do something is delusional, you need men with guns- I suppose some vigilante citizen militia could also work though.

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