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Comment by sircastor | Hacker News Reader

A little while back I recall some pundit describing Facebook as believing that this kind of data was theirs. Not “theirs for the taking”, but literally if they could find a way to obtain it, they considered it their right to have it. Like it was baked into the culture of the company. The more I read about Facebook’s practices, the more it rings true.

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IIRC, Facebook got its start by scraping student data from university servers. If so, the belief that any data it can get its hands on is fair game pretty much is the foundation of the company.

Zuckerberg and a lot of tech/SM CEOs have a strong "rules for thee, not for me" vibe when it comes to personal privacy. One day they'll claim "privacy is outdated" or "a matter of context" in relation to their business, and the next they'll spend fortunes to protect and insist on personal privacy for their family and themselves. One can only imagine that billions they make do a lot to paper over the ethical void at the heart of many of the businesses under their control.

They act like classic spies. Spies will eagerly take all data they can touch, but loath giving any data about themselves. Personally I think this superficial similarity reflects a more meaningful underlying truth: Facebook, and several of the others, are in fact a commercial branch of the US intelligence apparatus.

https://www.theonion.com/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-...

Yeah, but specifically Zuckerberg. He's never cared about other people

Exactly why I consider Facebook to be a monstrously overgrown malware that was allowed to become a corporation.

Yes. Facebook was a skeezy company at the start, and has never stopped being so.

There was a belief for a time that consumers no longer cared about privacy, that the millennial generation preferred to share everything, and harvesting data was fine because the concept of privacy was antiquated.

What surprised a lot of tech execs was that when people understood how much data was collected they got creeped out and when given the option to opt-out of data collection they agreed at very high rates.

Apple's move to limit in-app tracking was genius because any lawsuit from FB or similar is counter-productive - consumers are given the option and they opt out at 99%. Suing Apple to force them to let FB track consumers would be a PR disaster.

Have you ever read Yurtle the Turtle by Dr. Seuss? It’s the story of a turtle who considered himself “the king of all that I can see,” and kept building a tower of turtles higher and higher to see more, and thus rule more…

Ironically, if Yurtle had used the metaverse, he could have kept the illusion going indefinitely and would have remained happy. While the other turtles could have gone happily about their daily lives, because it turns out they never needed a king and all he did was burden them with his vanity projects.

I think we can apply this in real life with advanced AI bots, from whom Metas advanced scraping software can gather data which can then be used to show the bots relevant ads.

>There was a belief for a time that consumers no longer cared about privacy, that the millennial generation preferred to share everything, and harvesting data was fine because the concept of privacy was antiquated.

It's not like this is wrong. If you give consumers the choice of paying $5/month directly for some service vs. providing $5/month in personal data then they'll pretty much always choose the latter - I don't believe this has changed.

What has changed is that now third parties are better-able to disrupt companies from Meta from silently harvesting personal data as a default, and consumers generally don't mind this because they see the result as them getting to use the data-harvesting websites for free. Just like they're happy to use adblockers even if that collectively results in sites having to use heavy-handed subscription policies. If you give people the option to free ride, it's not surprising that they do it.

Anecdotally every non-tech person I know gives literally zero Fs about their data/privacy. They're FAR more annoyed by the cookie / tracking pop-ups than what they represent, and would generally opt to just be tracked everywhere than be annoyed with the question. I'd also say that the majority of my tech friends feel about the same, and do not care, and have the "I have nothing to hide / who cares if they see my boring life" attitude.

What about if you film them in public? I’m sure those same people would care a lot, they just understand things differently. If there was more of a sensory experience to having your data/privacy invades, such as someone putting a camera up to your face - then non-tech people would get it.

Depends what you mean by that. If you mean someone in their face with a camera or microphone. Then, yeah I'd agree they would be upset. However, pretty much everyone walks into stores daily that record video/audio, and have signs informing people of it. No one seems to care.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it“

It doesn't seem like there are ANY rules at Facebook.

They put out a vpn app targeting kids ... and when told not to do that they renamed it and put it back on the store a little while later.

If they can get it they'll do whatever it takes.

Of course it's baked into the culture of the company. The CEO famously called his users "dumb fucks"[1] for trusting him with their data. As far as I'm concerned there's no reason to think his basic attitude has changed. Just the messaging has gotten better.

[1] https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zucker...

> The CEO famously called his users "dumb fucks"[1]

The sourcing for that claim is extremely poor. The Esquire article links to a Business Insider article from 2010, which in turn cites "anonymous sources" on a 2004 IM conversation:

> According to SAI sources, the following exchange is between a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and a friend shortly after Mark launched The Facebook in his dorm room

Amendment: the Esquire and SAI sourcing is poor, but the New Yorker is more credible on this point, partly because it interviewed Zuckerberg. See https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jbullock35#33099479.

Sounds like an iteration of "might is right".

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/might%20is%20righ...

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