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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of what you think about the company or their products, letting them get away with this sets a dangerous precedent in my opinion. Whether you agree with the specific laws they’ve broken, the precedent would allow companies to break other laws you might agree with more (and do more damage as a result).

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Their "legal" business model should already be illegal. They are just testing the system to see how far they can get away with stuff.

And even this I highly doubt anything will come out of it.

Companies break laws every minute. Basically every US company operating in the EU is breaking GDPR post-Privacy Shield right now: it's illegal to transfer data of EU residents to US data centers.

Oil and gas companies have been blatantly breaking laws for decades.

Volkswagen, along with a majority of car manufacturers have been cheating emissions testing for ages.

Big banks literally rigged LIBOR through intentionally lying about numbers and laughing and not a single executive is in jail.

And they all set dangerous precedents, and now uber is setting yet another. And we all got dumber by taking the discussion to this direction. Enough defeatism.

To add to that, it could also be inferred that the Ubers of the world are able to get to where they are from the numbing affect of all the previous evilCorps that came before creating the death from a thousand paper cuts scenario.

They're just standing on the shoulders of evilCorpGiants?!

Agreed! And they should be held accountable too!

I'm not sure what your point is.

IIRC, Volkswagen were fined several billion, and a number of senior executives were charged.

My point is that the precedent has already been set, and a company that essentially allowed people to transact freely (away from the taxi cartel and regulatory capture) isn't the straw that's going to break the camels back.

IMO there's a big difference between breaking the law to optimize some otherwise-legitimate activity and starting an entire business on something that (at least at the time) was illegal in most countries.

I find what Volkswagen did worse. They polluted our air beyond the acceptable limit. On the other hand, Uber broke taxi laws that were anti-consumer anyway.

Volkswagen was the only one that was caught, you mean.

They weren't the only one that was caught.

Just like SMU wasn't doing anything the other schools were not doing. They just got caught. It is an example of how using the extreme punishment had a much larger collateral damage blast radius than intended.

Ohhh, they did a lot more then just braking taxi laws. According to this leak they engaged in illegal lobbying (which I would simply call bribery), and evidence tampering.

> Basically every US company operating in the EU is breaking GDPR post-Privacy Shield right now: it's illegal to transfer data of EU residents to US data centers.

This is not true and the devil is in the details. It's illegal to transfer "personal data" of EU residents. The definition of personal data under the GDPR is what US companies would consider PII or personally identifiable information and not all companies collect PII. In fact, I would argue most companies go out of there way to not store PII.

> In fact, I would argue most companies go out of there way to not store PII.

email address and ip is pii. So basically everything uses pii even if it is only for bot and ddos protection

Not all companies store IP addresses. Or email addresses for that matter. And whether or not an email is PII depends on a lot of factors for your company but alone an email address is not legally PII.

>So basically everything uses pii even if it is only for bot and ddos protection

If I use Cloudflare for example, as DDoS mitigation, I am not storing PII, Cloudflare is and thus Cloudflare has to deal with the legalities of that.

Even just transferring is not allowed without consent. And if you are the "controller" (ie. you are using Cloudflare to serve your customers) you would take the fine, not Cloudflare. And IP and email are PII.

Maybe it's time for mandatory penalty minimum set somewhere in the 3-100x profits made due to breaking the law. I'm tired of reading about how e.g. an investment fund settled for 100M with no admission of guilt after making a billion breaking the law.

The people who write the laws and control who's in government are corrupt as hell.

Think about the collateral damage caused by killing companies that break the law: lots of people lose their jobs, and most of them had nothing to do with the illegal act. That's not justice.

So what’s the alternative?Corporations can’t keep getting away with this.

As bad as China’s politics is, their businesses bend the knee to the government.

Sounds like “too big to fail” and a 2-tier justice system. Employ enough people, get immunity.

They may agreed on settlement because case and outcome was not that obvious.

Or that the plaintiffs couldn't afford not to settle, more likely than not.

Plaintiff lives on budget money, and even he loses the case, he doesn't get any damage back. It is strong incentive to go to court.

What is the point of this? That new companies should be even smarter than the stablished ones and therefore try to game the system even more? Or that we should learn from them and try to improve the situation and make all of them follow the rules?

His point was going after newer and smaller companies is a joke when larger companies are basically getting away with murder, or more accurately doing nearly the same thing you're punishing smaller companies for doing (at a larger scale)

I still don’t understand the reasoning.

The way to follow the rules is looking who is doing worst and take that as an upper bound?

More like it's pointless to say you can't do X behavior but someone else can

You mostly need to outlaw all of it or someone will keep doing it. Going after smaller companies won't change anything

> don’t understand the reasoning

Prioritising limited enforcement resources based on harm minimisation.

As a citizen of a democratic country I still prefer the laws dictating what is harmful rather than a CEO and a member of the government unilaterally.

And if something goes wrong use the tools from a democratic regime to change it. Even with its drawbacks democracies are the best system known to rule countries.

> Basically every US company operating in the EU is breaking GDPR post-Privacy Shield right now

No expert but in New Relic you can select in which data center your data should be. In fact many websites of US newspapers are not accessible from the EU. Just recently I had to order a gadget through reship.com because I couldn't buy it directly...

Yes, but why are you saying this? Because you think we should allow more of it? Or because you think we have fundamental problems we need to fix? Or some other reason?

This will codify that breaking the law is a cost of doing business. Uber already killed a person by disabling the brakes on their self driving car.

But this isn't about Uber, this is about power and corporate personhood.

I despise how they operated from start through 2017. But do I wish Uber had never happened? Nope. Also, when you say "letting them get away with .." are you including Macron, Biden etc in "them'?

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