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Comment by dcastm | Hacker News Reader

If you think objectively about this issue, it's hard to see how they can get a positive ROI out of this.

Simon does a great job highlighting why this doesn't make sense from the technical and business standpoints: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/14/ai-trust-crisis/#faceb...

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I'm not so worried about the corporation's ROI calculations at the top as much as paperclip maximizing middle management with warped incentives and little in the way of corporate controls or morals. We're one badly designed KPI and generic internal data collection API away from such spying falling through the cracks. Once it's there, the incentives are heavily against looking too hard at where the data came from until a public scandal draws an executive's attention.

It's played out over and over again, especially with Facebook. They don't deserve the benefit of the doubt, even when "logically" the ROI for the company doesn't make sense. Facebook specifically can't be trusted at the executive level either; that culture trickles down.

Sorry, I’ve worked for and known about too many companies that “spent money to make money” and went bankrupt.

You can’t use net profit as a yardstick of rationality in the corporate world, but especially Corporate America. People will seek revenue that results in negative returns on investment. There’s nothing rational about it, which is the problem.

They can increase revenue by making ethically terrible decisions. Full stop.

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