Comment by scuff3d | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scuff3d | Hacker News Reader

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

https://cybernews.com/privacy/meta-flo-period-data-privacy-l...

https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/mega_scandal/Onli...

https://apnews.com/article/google-smartphone-surveillance-ve...

https://www.security.org/identity-theft/breach/equifax/

4 major incidents and a site referring to dozens more, and that's just a few minutes of searching.

And that's only tech companies'(or tech related) misconducted. If we broaden the scope to corporations in general I'm pretty sure I would hit a post text limit before I even got through a quarter of them.

It's like the old saying goes "Every regulation is written in blood". Regs don't exist because someone doesn't want technology to progress. They exist because companies have shown time and again, as far back as you'd like to go, that they are not responsible members or society. They're willing to do anything in the name of profits, including mass privacy violations, abusing customers, and in extreme cases allowing people to die.

And who was harmed, precisely, and how? The EU sanctimony complex regularly cites these things as if each were an infosec Chernobyl, but I've yet to see a real-world harm come from these incidents. The advocates say they're harmful because they violate privacy rules, and we need the privacy rules lest companies cause harm by violating them. It's circular. The rules are made up. They do not correspond to the prevention of suffering on the part of real people in the real world.

Even if we were to grant that these alleged privacy disasters causes harm, we'd have to balance them against the lost advantages of refusal to deploy the enabling technologies. It's like banning telephones on the account of everything crime anyone's ever organized over a phone call.

Rules are all made up (as tech is) for the purpose of enabling society and lowering suffering. Who was harmed? Everyone whose private personal information have been leaked without consent. Who was harmed? Who have been manipulated into voting? How has the damage not been diffuse and probabilistically significant? (otherwise, why would Cambridge Analytica even funded and paid for? As well as the whole advertising industry?)

And, a fundamental right does not need an existing harm to be justified into existence: it is a right as first principle.

I personally know at least half a dozen people who were victims of identity theft thanks to data breaches. Costing them thousands of dollars and countless hours...

Regardless, your argument is predicated on the idea that violations of privacy and data collection is somehow fundamental to these services, in most cases it is not. Google and Facebook don't need to hoover up all your data to sell or use to advertise to you. They choose to, and the vast majority of users were/are unaware of it.

Beyond that, several of the articles I linked are for either negligence (failing to fix known issues) or collecting/using data without consent.

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