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Comment by akagusu | Hacker News Reader

This is the kind of thing that should be illegal.

Once upon a time, I would ship word docs with a remote image using a unique URL that I host. When someone opens the word doc (and accepts remote images) the URL is fetched and I know when someone opened a doc that was destined for a particular recipient.

It's quite interesting when the doc intended for a specific recipient is opened in 15 different geographical areas. Even more interesting when that specific recipient was under an NDA.

My question to you is if this should be made illegal? (since it is the same action facebook appears to be doing)

I didn't know Facebook was protecting documents under NDA.

Can you provide references?

Oh apologies I didn’t realize it was only Facebook that would be specifically targeted in the law. By all means, please continue!

And who do you think has the lobbying, law-making, and regulatory advantage here? Facebook or 5 billion disaggregated people around the world?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action

You should be a able to change how URLs work for your own website. They're not making any promise of stability here.

You can. The problem is that they're changing them to actively and intentionally circumvent the expressed wills of people visiting their site.

I'm allowed to move my arms like I want, but that doesn't give me the right to push people off cliffs.

Should we also ban sites formatting their pages so that you can't easily block their ads?

Intent matters.

Many sites do this very intentionally, including Facebook. Look sometime at the markup on their "sponsored" disclosures

I believe the problem is not the ads but the tracking.

Formatting pages to make ad blocking difficult is another example of websites making a conscious choice to thwart user intent.

In both cases, sites are attempting to tie content consumption to content monetization, and users are attempting to get the content without the monetization because they dislike side effects of the monetization.

Most websites track users. Even if they don't try to monetize content or show ads.

you're ignoring political purposes, and the political engagement of even the most vocally apolitical orgs. and you're ignoring abuse of access granted through neglect

That's changing the topic and avoiding the question.

It's also further defending hostile dark patterns and evading explicitly expressed personal intent.

The browser is a user agent, not a publisher or advertiser agent.

I would be in favor

Yes, this kind of tricks by corporations.

I guess they should just be done with it and say if you don’t opt in don’t use FB.

Very poor metaphor.

The will of the (informed) visitor doesn’t matter when they are visiting a place. I can’t have an intention to take a painting from a museum, ranging about the museum making it hard

I'm all in for making this kind behaviour illegal by big corporations which is used by large population.

This is a bold opinion

The times I've seen these corporations doing cunning harmful actions, I've left with zero sympathies for them.

Not when it impacts peoples' right to privacy and control over their own data. Do you work for Facebook?

How many "this should be illegal"s are we going to see on this website before people realize that powerful platforms have the money, power, and politics to lobby their way out of everything? A huge chunk of this was made illegal through the GDPR, and for years on this website everyone said it was a massive overreach. Or maybe we make this spend 5 years making this specific thing illegal and they circumvent it all in two weeks. Or they just ignore it and pay the paltry fines as a cost of doing business.

Not to mention the giant groups of people working at FAANG here, directly complicit with this behavior, afraid their salary and stock options will tank if anything changes.

Companies have the willpower and money to fight any sort of check on their power, well after the rest of us are all beyond exhausted.

So we should just give up? Yes it's a hard problem trying to regulate the behavior of companies with the resources and determination to subvert consumer rights, but it's not binary, incremental progress is possible. If you have ideas for a better approach perhaps you could share them here.

there are more radical options than incremental reform under a widening power imbalance

One of many benefits of posting "this should be illegal" is that it exposes what people think about the problem.

We think the problem is just the big corp circumventing moral, ethics and even law for make a profit, but how many people here support this behavior?

We are not only talking about people working there, but people from the outside, completely unrelated, telling they are right and that they should keep doing what they are doing.

Maybe we can not fight big corps because they have all the money and power, but people, we definitely can fight them.

another way to put it is that even if there isn't consensus on a legal solution (particularly when those kind of solutions involve state power and violence), it's fine to express and promote a moral stance

There are laws against it (in certain parts of the world at least). Of course, those laws do allow tracking in certain situations. Of course that makes enforcement harder - enforcers need to figure out if this is not an allowed case. Moreover, enforcement agencies vary in execution, with the Irish DPA so bad, their actions are indistinguishable from actively undermining GDPR.

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