Hacker News Reader

Comment by itronitron | Hacker News Reader

I also assume that Elon and his backers will do far worse things with Twitter users' data.

What makes you think that? In contrast to Alexa, my Tesla does not show me any ads. And I’ve also not been followed around by ads targeted based on places I have driven by, eben though that would be a low hanging fruit if Tesla was run by Zuckerberg or Bezos.

“Selling ads” is not the appropriate analogue here. It’s selling precise location data. Tesla apparently does not currently sell location data from its vehicles, but it’s not inconceivable that they will one day, whether or not you perceive it in the form of in-car ads.

I'm no fan of Tesla, but they area hardly unique in having a car with an embedded cellular modem that is in constant communication back to the mothership. Indeed I challenge you to find ANY car for sale today that isn't automatically tethered to it's manufacturer. It's also why I have zero desire to change any of my older cars for something "better". I wish I could find a site that would catalog which cars out there can have their embedded cellular modems disabled and not freakout/threaten to stop working.

Certainly not. In this regard, Tesla is no worse (and very possibly better) than most other manufacturers. My point was about potential and future profit; that kind of data is hard to resist in a less hospitable market.

Were I to own a car, I’d probably in the same boat as you.

Just wait until he starts putting twitter front and center in the infotanment system

Why?

I'm not the grandparent poster, but maybe the answer is "there are 44 billion reasons and 1 impulsive guy at the helm"...

because they can

Because to some, myself included, Elon has not shown to have any ethical guidance other than self enrichment.

Anyone who has a "Rules for thee, but not for me" ideology doesn't seem like they'd have too much problem selling people out.

I would make this argument for all of silicon valley. We know for a fact Google and Facebook sell people out, actively, right now. We also know pre-Musk Twitter had a host of internal issues and questionable ethics.

>Anyone who has a "Rules for thee, but not for me" ideology

Your referring to Twitter pre Musk, and not Musk, right?

https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

I'm not sure what you are trying to say with this. Musk for a while was a fairly laudable person who garnered a lot of respect. He had a dignified public image. Sometime around the Thailand cave thing he went pretty off the rails and seems to likely have started a pretty serious drug problem.

Just like Rogan, the dilbert guy, and many others he seems to have gone from mostly reasonable to corrupted and self contradictory and it's not really clear how or why that happens. It's hard to know if he was always the way he appears to be now or if there was some kind of transformation.

Call it the "Jordan Peterson Effect", since he seemed to go through that cycle the fastest.

The phrase I've heard is "audience capture": people who spend a lot of time in the public sphere end up tailoring their statements and behavior to whatever gets them the most engagement from their most responsive audience.

I read a thoughtful (but long) discussion of this phenomenon at https://rebelwisdom.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-jordan-p...

Elon and Rogan haven't changed and they are still mostly reasonable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com