Before you get too far up the ass of “this darned generation, personal responsibility, blabla yadda” you might just want to look at the facts. Eula’s are written to be obtuse and require a legal scholar to sift through, and most people are not lawyers. The tech itself is not something most poeple understand. A huge number of people getting their data mined are kids, who have been raised with this tech, but never taught to use it responsibly. Facebook has billions of dollars and users based on the premise that an army of amoral programmers and corporate goons can separate you from your data.
Believe it or not, what’s obvious to you as someone who reads HN, isn’t obvious to most people. Of course, most people wouldn’t struggle to understand that, which gives them a leg up on you. How many people do you think even know what LineageOS is? Ten milllion? A hundred? Less than 7 billlion is all that matters to FB.
Not being a programmer or computer buff isn’t lacking personal responsibility. You are not the standard by which all people are judged, in the same way that your obvious shortcomings don’t mean you lack personal responsibility either. You’re just human, and prone to error and misjudgment like the rest of us. You’re part of the flock, just with a bit more insight into tech and a bit less insight into other people and yourself. Get over it.
When you go to a doctor, you’re given the standard of informed consent, because it’s understood that you don’t understand medicine. Presumably you appreciate that doctors can’t bullshit you and then berate you for a lack of personal responsibility because you got into tech, not medicine. Certainly your ignorance is no excuse to abuse your trust. Yet somehow you think software is different?
If they can examine the code (and this is only going to get more important), then they, or the people they trust to look at it, can make informed decisions.
I believe FB makes something like $6.50 per user. Obviously Google makes money from users too, and given overlap it seems likely that one user is worth quite a bit annually. Average that out over lifetime value, and we’re talking thousands of dollars.
Imagine if the likes of Equifax treated silos of data as a liability instead of an asset to be milked. Properly valued, a breach of hundreds of millions of people’s data would end a business, even as large as Equifax.
I agree. Now what about engineers at Google, especially with their drone program partnership with the DOD? How about engineers at Uber making cars that are unfit for the road?Engineers in general need to either grow a spine and a conscience fast, or they need enforced ethical standards. It’s. It just Facebook, although Facebook is particularly nasty, and there is no sign of people giving upon their cushy jobs to do the right thing.
Mostly they seem happy to go public while babbling about how they’re “changing the world” as in that pitiful letter from DropBox.
In the US and most Western countries, it takes a lot of work to do what you’re describing, and there would be pushback. Going after a few people is no problem, but a whole population? No. China can do it because it’s an autocracy, with a long history of autocratic rule, strong central government and weak institutions. In the US politicians have to get re-elected.
Ironically it’s just these kinds of laws which may finally create a broader popular drive to re-decentralize. Those people looking for sex and drugs and whatever else aren’t going to just say, “well shit, the government said no, let’s head to church.” They’re going to look for alternatives, and alternatives will be there for them. It won’t be glossy Java-heavy “Web 2.0” of course, it will be Tor, Mastadon, and encrypted communications.
That’s the real strength of the internet, you cut of
F a head and two more grow back. If more stringent laws are passed, that just creates more drive for alternatives. It’s going to be ugly, but I remember when the internet was ugly, but worked. It won’t make people filthy rich overnight, but that’s not the net either. People still want to hook up, buy guns and weed, and just talk without Big Brother breathing down their neck. It will start small, and grow fast; after all we have a few decades worth of roadmap.
People who’ve moaned about people needing to look past a handful of sites are possibly going to get their wish. The total inability for governments to field sustainable technical solutions to shutting down commas has not changed.
You’re being obtuse. It’s morally bankrupt to experiment on humans without their informed consent. At least, I hope you’re being obtuse, and not just utterly broken.
If you think it’s an appeal to emotion, make a real argument in that direction, don’t bluntly state the contents of your head and move on. As it stands, you just appear morally bankrupt. I’m strongly inclined to believe that’s the case, and your inability to make a cogent argument makes me wonder about what else you’re lacking.
By the way, you may be misunderstanding “appeal to emotion” as “having emotions” and that’s worrying. I can only hope your attitude is literally pathological, and not just your personality. Either way, please never work near people, or I’m a critical system effecting people.
In a lot of ways I envy these people; there's a lot of hardship they face with the lack of permanent address, and I can't imagine that RV living is incredibly pleasant nor cheap compared to more conventional house, but they're also untethered in ways that make living "normally" seem like the crazy proposition.
When it’s a choice you get to make, not when it’s your only choice. Don’t you have a shred of empathy? Envy them... Jesus Christ this site!
Freedom from dignity or the respect of your peers, of stability, of the ability to start or raise a family, and freedom from much of the dating pool. As a bonus you get to wonder when what little you have might vanish and you’re “free” from that too, and “free” to live on the streets.
You know, medical research would be so much faster and easier and cheaper if we could just test new drugs and devices and procedures on humans. We don’t. We shouldn’t. Half of all humans who have ever lived, died from mosquito-borne illnes, about 5,000,000,000 human lives. People who argue that the relatively paltry number of people killed by automobiles justifies a little “sacrifice” to prevent it in the future, never seem to apply that callousness to other arenas. Certainly those people are not lining up to volunteer as test subjects.
We don’t get to make that choice for others. If you want to try give yourself Yellow Fever(1) to help prevent its spread, you go for it. If you want to infect other people for the same reason (1), go to hell. The same applies to cars. If you’re volunteering to push a bike on a dark test track for Uber, you go be you. If you want to make the state of Arizona’s citizens unconsenting guinea pigs for the same reason, go to hell.
This isn’t a new concept, it’s just a new tech, the moral dimension hasn’t changed. The fact that ethical R&D is harder than unethical R&D isn’t news, and isn’t an excuse.
If helping the US government refine their drone strike capabilities didn’t make them realize, I think it’s fair to say they’re totally self-interested. If you want to get their attention, go after their personal bottom line.
I get this, and I’m sure if my kid was in this situation I’d feel the same way. For all of the kids who aren’t mine though, I can see the other poster’s point. That’s just as much a part of being human as being attached to your own offspring.
In other words, I’m not going to stare, or look away from a disabled kid. I’m also not going to invest emotionally, or go out of my way to change how I think and act day in and out for them. If someone asks me for help, I’ll help, but they’re not likely to register for me otherwise. I won’t look away, but I also won’t look; disability doesn’t make me more or less invested in strangers.
You say parody, I say honest representation voted to the top of the page, on article that was knocked off the front page by flagging or mods. Part of the problem is that quite a few people here are representative of the broader industry which is full of young people who think the last decade and half are just how the world works. These are the people who look at all progress as though it must conform to Moore’s Law, and think the unregulated free-for-all of their industry so far is just how it is.
Reality is slow to catch up to new things, but it is utterly inevitable.
Silicon Valley, and software engineering in general needs regulation, but it also needs to regulate itself. The whole Libertarian wet dream is fine when you’re in college, less so when you’re building self-driving cars or surveillance networks. The lack of enforced ethical standards has always been problematic, but now it’s getting dangerous.
Once you’re involved in everything from healthcare, and automobiles, to drone strikes, you’re sll grown up and the training wheels need to die. The alternative is that this pressure continues to build and the public demands extreme regulation without understanding what they’re regulsting.
Tl;dr grow up, or they’ll come for the good (encryption) along with the bad (carelessness with human lives a la Uber).
Unless you use one of the free options to block them, like uMatrix. It’s easy, it requires little or no effort. My bigger concern with FB is what they learn about me from people other than myself; I can’t control thst at all.
Believe it or not, what’s obvious to you as someone who reads HN, isn’t obvious to most people. Of course, most people wouldn’t struggle to understand that, which gives them a leg up on you. How many people do you think even know what LineageOS is? Ten milllion? A hundred? Less than 7 billlion is all that matters to FB.
Not being a programmer or computer buff isn’t lacking personal responsibility. You are not the standard by which all people are judged, in the same way that your obvious shortcomings don’t mean you lack personal responsibility either. You’re just human, and prone to error and misjudgment like the rest of us. You’re part of the flock, just with a bit more insight into tech and a bit less insight into other people and yourself. Get over it.
When you go to a doctor, you’re given the standard of informed consent, because it’s understood that you don’t understand medicine. Presumably you appreciate that doctors can’t bullshit you and then berate you for a lack of personal responsibility because you got into tech, not medicine. Certainly your ignorance is no excuse to abuse your trust. Yet somehow you think software is different?
If they can examine the code (and this is only going to get more important), then they, or the people they trust to look at it, can make informed decisions.
You can’t be this out of touch with reality.