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Comment by abujazar | Hacker News Reader

Those fines are pocket money for the offenders. Why are there no real consequences?

Regulators have largely been defanged in the US for decades now.

Just read the article and note that this was discovered in 2018, the FCC decided to do something in 2020, and from then until now it's been gridlocked by Republican party obstruction on the panel.

And this isn't nearly the end of it. It'll go to court under appeal, for more years, and who knows how that falls.

The result is regulators like the FCC and SEC barely enforce any standard of corporate behavior. A big part of it is they've been so gutted they don't have the resources to meet the necessary volume even in the absence partisan gridlock.

This is what happens when "Government bad, regulations bad" rhetoric comes home to roost. The violators pay a token fine and the average American gets screwed.

Maybe we should rethink that rhetoric just a bit?

> Maybe we should rethink that rhetoric just a bit?

Blatant emotional manipulation is not suitable for HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Given that you just replied with "This might be the funniest comment I've ever read here." and then deleted your comment, let me be more precise:

The line

> Maybe we should rethink that rhetoric just a bit?

exists purely to manipulate others. There's no logic, no reason, no intellect - just base degradation of others through condescension and attempts at imputing shame. Comments like this are utterly inappropriate for HN, as a casual reading of the linked HN guidelines would show.

Yeah, I found your comment unreasonable and made a snarky reply, but then decided that didn't really contribute anything so deleted it.

I do not in any way agree my line above is somehow emotional manipulation. I think you're being overly defensive.

Your disagreement doesn't matter - the fact is that that part of the comment was written solely to manipulate people. Nobody ever says things like "Maybe we should rethink that rhetoric just a bit?" unless they're intending to shame and guilt others. There's no informational content or facts or logic or anything remotely valuable in that statement. Its sole purpose is to tweak people's emotions, nothing more.

Government is the biggest buyer of location data and doesn't want it to stop.

We just had our constitutional rights shat on. Slap on the wrist....

What constitutional right to privacy from private parties? There’s no explicit constitutional right to privacy, and the constitution only binds the government.

Possibly the first amendment, "petition the government for redress of grievances". Privacy violation is not an explicitly enumerated grievance, but neither are most causes for civil litigation.

Also possibly not; it depends on the particulars and the judge.

That’s about grievances against the government itself, not private parties.

I'm not sure where this idea comes from. That clause is treated as the source of the right to access the civil litigation system; this is what "petitioning the government for redress of grievances" means. The right to sue the government itself doesn't meaningfully exist except as the government permits (sovereign immunity), and it was much later that this clause was read (IMO correctly but I'm just some dude) to cover non-litigation activities.

You definitely have the right to petition the government for redress of this grievance: you can ask your representatives to pass laws banning it.

The first amendment would have nothing to do with that actual law though (since if it were, literally anything could be considered a grievance)

You also have the right to litigate under common law, which does have a lot to do with the first amendment. Though granted, you are individually unlikely to prevail in that way. Like said, it depends on the particulars and the judge.

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