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Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

I'm quite comfortable knowing what they are and pointing out the early-2010s naive absolutist approach to privacy didn't work, hence where we are.

Regardless of whether people choose to conversate by telling me what to Google, instead of coming with curiosity and/or contributions.

The same thought process that leads to commentators being confused why Apple rejected someone's app for having a privacy policy of "I don't collect data" applies here.

I'm glad a less naive, and non-absolutist, approach has gotten tangible results, even if it'll take a few years for it to be common wisdom rather than disagreeable to look back on the 2010s and say so.

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If you knew what they were, you wouldn't have used the phrase "when people are free to choose to have an account with them."

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean.

The article we're discussing, and attendant court decision, is about someone with a Facebook account and the ads in their "social media news feed", not someone without an account who was being profiled.

Did I miss something?

Tangentially, I'd also like to, again, gently, push back on the idea that it's conducive to community health to use an accusatory interlocution approach, especially one that relies on mind-reading to make the accusations.

To provide explanation as to why I am comfortable claiming that, some excerpts from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

- "...Converse curiously; don't cross-examine."

- "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less"

- "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

- "Please don't post shallow dismissals...A good critical comment teaches us something."

My apologies if I misinterpreted, but this sentence:

"It's hard to legislate "you cannot collect any info about people ever", when people are free to choose to have an account with them."

Implied to me that you were saying that the information they were gathering was only coming from people who have an account with them. I don't have an account with them, and I'm pretty sure they're collecting all sorts of data on me (despite having every known Meta hostname in my /etc/hosts file pointing to 127.1).

But reading your sentence again, it looks like you were saying something a little different. It seems like I might have misunderstood your point at first glance. My apologies for the snark.

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