Hacker News Reader

Comment by rukuu001 | Hacker News Reader

Never mind the list of companies - I'd be very curious to know what the 'trust signals' are that would help you trust a company?

View on HN

For hardware, I'd only trust a company if they didn't also have an interest in data. In fact, I'd trust a hardware company more if they didn't also have a big software division.

A company like AMD I would trust more than a company like Apple.

Decent management. A lack of change of business model, no rug pulls and such. Fair value for money. Consistency over the longer term. No lock in or other forced relationships. Large enough to be useful and to have decent team size, small enough to not have the illusion they'll conquer the world. Healthy competition.

Admirable, but short of a local credit union I used to use (which I am no longer with as they f'd up a rather critical transaction), I can scarcely imagine a business that fits such a model these days. The amount of transparency needed to vet this would be interesting to find though, and its mere presence probably a green flag.

It's much easier to use this to reject than to accept.

Are there any companies existing you would trust?

I honestly can’t name a single one I know of who could pass that criteria

Edit:found your other comment answering a similar question

the way they respond to security and privacy incidents + publishing technical security + privacy papers / docs

Apple = Run more commercials with black backgrounds and white text that says

SECURITY

PRIVACY

---

Heyyy it never said "good privacy" perceive as you want...

Don't publicly acknowledge that you were the reason someone got murdered and 1000 VIPs got hacked.

One day when I'm deemed a 'Baddie', I looked at Apple as inspiration.

Good one, yes, that is important.

And do they approach Security as a Feature or as a Process. The fingers on one hand are enough to count them...

No past history of shady planned-obsolescence sprinkled in a bunch of their products, for one.

So that rules out Apple.

A leadership team that is very open and involved with the community, and one that takes extra steps, compared to competitors, to show they take privacy seriously.

Planned obsolescence tells me they don't make money on the daily use of their software and they need me to buy more hardware in order to make money.

I'd go for a co-operative ownership model rather than capitalist?

and make sure the member/owners are all of like mind, and willing to pay more to ensure security and privacy

Co-operative will have significantly worse privacy guarantee compared to shareholder based model. In the no one company wants to sacrifice on privacy standard just for the sake of it. They do it for money. And in shareholder based model, the employees are more likely to go against the shareholder when user privacy is involved, because they are not directly benefiting from it.

That's nonsense. Shareholders have an incentive to violate privacy much stronger than any one employee: they can sell their shares to the highest bidder and walk away with 'clean hands' (or so they'll argue) whereas co-op partners violating your privacy would have to do so on their own title with immediate liability for their person.

> Shareholders have an incentive to violate privacy much stronger than any one employee

Exactly what I said. We need lower shareholder interference not more, and in co-operative it's the opposite.

> with immediate liability for their person.

What do you mean?

The only shareholders in a co-op are the owners/operators ("employees"), or the owners/operators + customers (for example REI I believe). There's nobody seeking to extract value at the expense of the employees or the customers.

If, as a shareholder operator, a co-op member pressured themselves to exploit user data to turn a quick buck, I guess that's possible, but likely they'd be vetoed by other members who would get sucked into the shitstorm.

In my experience, co-op members and customers are more value-oriented than profit-motivated, within reason.

> but likely they'd be vetoed by other members who would get sucked into the shitstorm.

Why are shareholders less likely to veto a evil person in a company vs in a co-operative? I think in most cases, the evil person is likely to get vetoed but sometimes greed takes over, specially over period of years and decades.

Evil in a co-op means something different than evil in a corporation.

The corporation at the end of the day will lean back on profit motive as the core underlying value. This value , to a co-op, isn't inherently evil, but is often evil.

The co-op will happily sacrifice the co-op for the good of the members if push comes to shove. Whereas corporate shareholders constantly vote for things that result in e.g. layoffs, downsizing, restriction of benefits, salary freezes.

A cooperative does not have shareholders in your sense of the word.

Yes it does. In the purest sense, shareholder means "profit share" holders.

No, it does not mean that. In the purest sense it means 'fractional ownership', which can or may lead to profits.

Mondragon for IT... it's been my dream for decades.

We're no mondragon but I founded a co-op in IT space a few years back and it surprised me how open to the vision the members and customers have been.

I had assumed I'd have to lean more on the capitalistic values of being a co-op, like better rates for our clients, higher quality work, larger likelihood of our long term existence to support our work, more project ownership, so as to make the pitch palatable to clients. Turns out clients like the soft pitch too, of just workers owning the company they work within - I've had several clients make contact initially because they bought the vision over the sales pitch.

I'm trying to think about if I'd trust us more to set up or host openclaw than a VC funded startup or an establishment like Capital One. I think both alternatives would have way more resources at hand, but I'm not sure how that would help outside of hiring pentesters or security researchers. Our model would probably be something FOSS that is keyed per-user, so if we were popular, imo that would be more secure in the end.

The incentives leading to trust is definitely in a co-op's favor, since profit motive isn't our primary incentive - the growth of our members is, which isn't accomplished only through increasing the valuation of the co-op. Members also have total say in how we operate, including veto power, at every level of seniority, so if we started doing something naughty with customer data, someone else in the org could make us stop.

This is our co-op: 508.dev, but I've met a lot of others in the software space since founding it. I think co-ops in general have legs, the only problem is that it's basically impossible to fund them in a way a VC is happy with, so our only capitalization option is loans. So far that hasn't mattered, and that aligns with the goal of sustainable growth anyway.

Amazing, please write a book. My current venture is still called after that idea ("The Modular Company"), but I found that it is very hard to get something like that off the ground in present day Western Europe.

> but I found that it is very hard to get something like that off the ground in present day Western Europe.

Yes, agreed for the USA/Taiwan/Japan where we mostly operate. For us it's been understanding and leveraging the alternative resources we have. Like, we have a lot of members, but really only a couple are bringing in customers, despite plenty of members having very good networks.

Is your current a co-op? 200+ sales at 30k a pop seems to be pretty well off the ground!

Effectively, yes, but it is tiny. There is a corporate entity but it just serves to divide the loot between the collaborators.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com