I've been served well by this rule of thumb: "Don't trust big corporations."
That's it. It hasn't let me down yet in my many long years of life.
That's it. It hasn't let me down yet in my many long years of life.
- who provides your utilities?
- who provides your food, medications, other stuff that goes in your body?
- where do you get financial services, insurance, etc?
- do you drive? who made your car? do you ever fly?
For many of these categories there are likely a few examples of local governments, co-ops, or mid-size/small companies offering in some of these categories, but not in a comprehensive way -- i.e. you can get some of your food from a local CSA but likely not your whole diet, you might get much of your medical care from a Direct Primary Care model until you need something that's outside of their capacities, etc.
It couldn't possibly be because developers in general have proved themselves untrustworthy as well... right?
It couldn't possibly be because users have proven education and countless warnings are ineffective... right?
Common sense outside of our HN bubble says that if merely serving me food is regulated, if merely giving me a haircut requires registration and licensing, why is building apps that can steal my data, my money, and my reputation... not regulated? Surely, it's easier for most people to discern the quality of their food, or the quality of a barber, than an app! Yet even for food, and freaking haircuts, we societally don't trust people to understand warnings and use common sense. Either fix tech (even with laws that make HN furious)... or say those laws regarding haircuts are stupid too.
One difference here is the tool that you own is built to undermine your authority and instead do whatever Google says. It'd be like if scissors required biometric validation with Great Clips to open "to protect people from unlicensed haircutters".
In my home state, unlicensed barbering is up to $2,000 per incident. So sure, nothing is stopping you. Just as even now, nothing is stopping you from installing a custom ROM and running your own code, even if you might not be able to run other people's code.
> One difference here is the tool that you own is built to undermine your authority and instead do whatever Google says. It'd be like if scissors required biometric validation with Great Clips to open "to protect people from unlicensed haircutters".
This is also a thing in the real world; it's licensing to be able to purchase key fob reprogrammers. It's a real pain, even if the tools (illegally) end up on eBay. That's because the risk of a potentially stolen car is seen as extremely high... but an app's potential makes that look quaint.
Locking down car repair tools is another obviously abusive practice that primarily benefits the manufacturer and harms the owner, justified through some weak appeal to security, yes.
It's pretty sensible. You wouldn't advise people the opposite, would you?
If the behavior is identical between party A who uses the insulin but somehow doesn't "trust" the producer, and party B who both uses it and "trusts" the producer, what has party A achieved through their mistrust?
So even though there exist people at Facebook that have human attributes of empathy and "let's not fuck up half of society" – as a company, they don't behave that way, since it affects more abstract non-human concepts like the survival of the organization, or profit motives that are detached from individuals (like an employee's stock price or yearly bonuses).
I've seen acquaintances share fact sheets about times when drug makers were sued/fined for lying to the FDA, harming customers, manipulating prices, etc. All true! So people reasonably ask why they should be "forced" to have their products injected into them. And then they can get into all the reasons not to trust the FDA too...
Logically, just because a company has done some bad things doesn't mean their vaccines are unsafe. Or that the risks are worse than the disease. Or that sometimes mistakes just happen. And of course in their own lives people are hypocrites, break rules, do things like go back to cheating partners, etc.
I don't have a point here except to lament that things are complicated. Of course people are looking for justification of their beliefs. But maybe we should have held these companies to higher standards, and by allowing them to persist we were unwittingly eroding public trust to a tipping point that is now putting all of us at risk.
Vaccine manufacturers are not special. They are for-profit corporations, and the importance of the product they make gives them tremendous power.
For example take a look at Hep B vaccination. I spent hours one night trying to dig up primary source material and research from the 70s to justify it and the 3-course recommendation. It's obvious that Hep B is a serious illness for babies that can lead the problems much later in life, we know that. But how prevalent was it in the USA before the standard vaccine schedule was rolled out? Has anyone actually gone and looked through VAERS over the past 40 years and compared the rate of serious side effects like GB to a counterfactual base rate of Hep B? That's not a trivial statistics project, and nobody that I'm aware of has done it (although I'm bad at searching), yet we continue to vaccinate every single baby with 3 courses of Hep B. It's probably not a big deal, and I'm willing to believe that the people at the CDC probably know what they're doing (pre-2024) and have/had access to the right data and the right decision-making tools to set a good vaccine schedule. But if it came out that Hep B vaccination actually wasn't all that useful and we should probably stop doing it, it would certainly be inconvenient for the vaccine manufacturer. So there is absolutely an incentive to steer legitimate scientific inquiry toward some directions and away from directions.
All that is to say, trusting the science and being a supporter of evidence-based public health requires skepticism, precisely because for-profit corporations are always going to act like for-profit corporations regardless of what business they are in.
I mean, of course we don't trust big corporations.