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Comment by codemusings | Hacker News Reader

> They did absolutely monstrous shit in regards to privacy, that makes the meta of today look like a finely tuned privacy machine that serves to protect every user to the teeth.

How in the world did you come to that conclusion? Any Meta app you have on your smartphone is doing what they can to collect heuristics in order to identify you and serve you Ads. How is that any different? It's just not as obvious.

> Only nobody cared because that was the time prior to the latest privacy awakening [...]

You make it sound like it's a fad or the user simply didn't care in the 2000s. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. If a private company would park a van in front of your door to observe you 24/7 in order to sell mundane details about your daily life to advertisers you'd be up in arms. Yet in the digital space it's no big deal.

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> > They did absolutely monstrous shit in regards to privacy, that makes the meta of today look like a finely tuned privacy machine that serves to protect every user to the teeth. > How in the world did you come to that conclusion? Any Meta app you have on your smartphone is doing what they can to collect heuristics in order to identify you and serve you Ads. How is that any different? It's just not as obvious.

In the early days of Facebook there was a negative article about them in Harvard's student newspaper. Mark Zuckerberg looked for through the logs for login attempts from student journalists at the paper and used the passwords they entered to try to gain access to their email accounts.[0] I'd say that is significantly worse from a privacy perspective than using cookies to show you more relevant ads.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook

So when Zuckerberg's social world was Harvard he violated the privacy of the school. Now his social world is different and he'd have less reasons to perform those same crimes. Way more power and reason to perform an entirely different set of crimes though!

> You make it sound like it's a fad

Privacy is not a set concept.

If you had told my parents in their youth, that their kids would have a high likelihood of happily divulging big chunks of their private life to the world at large, as a matter of routine, they would quite literally not even have understood the concept, no matter in how much detail you would have explained all the steps leading up to that. Why would anyone want any of that?

I am building a small business in the medical field right now. People are real sensitive about their data – right until the point where they happily waive all privacy rights to push you to use WhatsApp for all sensitive communication, because, OF COURSE they'd want to use WhatsApp, what else, it's real convenient after all.

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