I’m surprised that so many people are missing this. Google and Facebook may come off better than most tech companies, but surely the real winners must be whoever was not relying on your personal data to begin with? E.g. tv, radio, and print.
Yes, a hidden factor seems far more likely. There is probably some secondary variable that affects both your mortality rate and your perception of your own fitness. This seems much more likely, even to the point of seeming obvious.
Yeah, you could imagine something like this. You could train a model about the types of ads that would be effective using the online data of those who consent (or Americans). You could download the model on each EU person’s computer, evaluate the model against local history, then request ads from resulting categories. It wouldn’t require moving their personal data off of their device. You could pay a small subset of people to serve as trainers for the model.
Yes, it would be hugely challenging to implement, but it definitely seems possible to do something along these lines.
You don’t know that, because you don’t know how many ads they would be showing in the alternate reality where they only show non-targeted advertisements.
Can they? I was under the impression that GDPR does not allow “accept tracking or else pay money”. If it does then that seems like an easy, obvious solution to the problem. So easy and obvious that the fact no one is implementing it makes me suspect it is not actually compliant.
You could probably take it a step further and say that it is in the user’s best interest to see targeted rather than generic advertising, because you can show fewer ads and make the same revenue. I don’t know if regulators will buy it though.
I for one am very interested to see how this continental experiment changes the experience of internet users in Europe. And I’m sure glad (at least in this dimension) that I’m not there. (Overall I think I’d be better off living in Europe despite the occasional law I disagree with, but that’s another story.)
So your proposal is basically the status quo? Personally I don’t think the status quo has much value compared to her solution. Having a few blessed date formats and an escape hatch is a better way. (That’s how we do it where I work. There is basically a “format time for logging” function that everything uses. And it works just fine.)
> Our understanding of what it means for the sun to be "in the sky" will likely undergo several revolutions in the next 100,000 years.
I wouldn’t bet on it.
> Your perception that the sun is in the sky is causally linked to your belief that it is daytime.
My perception is cause by electrical impulses from my eyes, which are caused by photons hitting those receptors. The photons themselves are caused by the sun, and their incoming vector is caused by its position relative to me. There is a causal chain, thus, causal linkage.
> If I am a schizophrenic and I hallucinate that the sun is in the sky even though it is night time then do I "know" that it is daytime?
Depends on what you mean by know. Your perceptions are not causally linked to a true belief, if that is what you are asking.
Historically, all kinds of words meant all kinds of different things than what they do now. A word means what people think it means. It is a symbol used to communicate an idea. We can wish that prescriptivist interpretations applied, but one thing we can’t seem to do is make that the reality.
On the other hand, exceptions such as this have proven very important to the American economy over the past half century or so, especially within the last twenty years. When your exceptions are numerous enough, or large enough, they sort of start to form their own rule.
I’m not sure the idiosyncratic tenets of Christianity or Judaism can serve as the foundation of sound economic (or other) policy. I need something more compelling than “a myth invented more than two thousand years ago says it’s a bad idea” to make me believe that there is something wrong with T-bills. For that matter, this seems like not such a great argument, because substantially all other countries also have their own analogue of treasury bonds, and few of them have inequality as bad as we do in the US.
What possible protection could you have in a non-master password scenario? If you’ve decided that you don’t want the user to have to enter a password, it’s game over from a perspective of trying to keep the password from being retrieved by an attacker with local execution. Even with a master password, you’re only safe until you enter it, then the attacker has that info as well.
It saddens me that the basis for such important decisions today is what people were doing more than two centuries ago. Not even what they thought was a good idea, just their actual practices! It was a different world back then. I understand the benefits of some amount of inertia in the rate of change of laws, but this seems like far too much.
Even in Tokyo, much of the place is single family homes or mid rise apartment and condo complexes. There are a number of huge skyscrapers here and there, but they are not as densely packed as manhattans.
I read my mortgage note cover to cover, and also the Facebook T&C front to back. They both seem pretty easy to understand to me, tbh. The standard CA home purchase contract is the scariest of the three, because there are so many options that can cause huge swings in value and liability.
For practical purposes, you can’t secure a dwelling without signing a long, complicated contract (be it a lease or a mortgage note). Yet dwelling is a necessity, even more so than a phone. And, in these contracts, so much more is on the line. According to your argument, you should not have to be bound by the terms of these agreements. You may indeed believe that, but I hope you can see how much of our society is based on the assumption that these agreements have force, and how far we are from moving to a state where they do not. You may wish it were otherwise, but there is essentially no chance of that change being enacted in the foreseeable future.
No matter how plain the language is, it cannot benefit someone who doesn’t read it. You may argue that the lack of plain language in T&C causes the lack of reading. But there’s a natural experiment here in the form of those same U.K. financial services terms you mentioned. Do you honestly believe that a large fraction of U.K. financial services consumers are informed about the terms of financial services they are consuming? I have no data here, but the concept beggars belief. Even if they are ten times as informed as American consumers of internet services, that would mean order 1% of consumers had read the terms, as opposed to 0.1% if people reading web T&Cs.
Even that strikes me as very unlikely, just examining my internal estimates how likely I’d be to read terms and conditions if they were in plain language. I don’t think the impenetrability of the language is the main barrier to reading T&Cs. The main barrier is that there is little on the line, and, moreover, I can already guess approximately what the T&Cs are going to say.
This is just a gut reaction. If you have some data to show that U.K. consumers are significantly more informed based on these plain language requirements, I’m happy to recant.
Was a time long, thoughtful, informed comments on this site garnered plaudits rather than gripes. Considering this is one of the only informed, reality-based comment in the entire thread, I think it’s best to engage with and appreciate it, rather than making easy jokes.
Is this a standard you would like to be subjected to from someone who is responsible for your money? For example, if your bank, through an accidental, non-fraudulent error, allowed a criminal to extract your account’s entire value as cash, do you think they ought to be able to defend themselves by saying they did not commit fraud?
> People suing if a bug in my software causes them to lose access to their account or coins
Everything else sounds pretty reasonable, but this doesn’t. If you cause someone harm, you should expect that they will attempt to recover damages from you, regardless of what your T&C says. I cannot fathom why you think you should be protected against this eventuality. Buy insurance instead.
Regarding your question, notwithstanding the hand-wringing on this page, a given T&C clause tends to exist because someone has been sued over the matter being clarified. If the law specified each point, or if society were less litigious, these clauses would not be necessary. But this is not the case. I think you would be a fool to risk your company’s wellbeing to satisfy the whims of uninformed HN commenters. Almost all of them will blindly accept and be bound by your T&C regardless of their stated beliefs on this site, and, even if that were not the case, they are a tiny, unrepresentative slice of your market.
Same here. A bar in a coffee shop would have compared favorably to that desk in size and ergonomics. Craziest thing about it was how at the time I was getting paid absolute tons of money, but in many ways my status at work felt more like my desk than my paycheck. I don’t know what that tells you about the human psyche, or mine. Rationally, I wouldn’t have traded much of the money for a better desk, but emotionally the money just felt like a number on a screen going up, while the desk felt visceral.
This seems to have moderately more information. It seems like maybe they wanted to use GPS capabilities in their guided weapons systems, and the US would not permit it or perhaps threatened to disable the system in that theater? It’s a bit confusing and fuzzy.
If Facebook purged your information, how could they verify your identity? They don’t want to provide the ability to check if an arbitrary person was leaked, because that has its own privacy issues. So in this context I wonder what you expect them to do.