Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Is the DMV gonna start giving away my license to Home Depot?

IIRC this already happens and businesses can buy DMV databases.

> Is facebook going to torpedo their business by selling this info?

Many businesses collect and sell this information. Where do all these online businesses, who charge users nothing, get their revenue? [EDIT: More simply said, that info arguably is the basis of the Internet economy]

> why would they want it?

To discriminate. They may offer different products or prices. They may discriminate because you are gay or transgender, because of your ethnic background, or because of your religious (e.g., Muslims) or political affiliation (e.g., communist, right-wing extremist, etc.). This can happen in more serious situations too, such as when dealing with government, law enforcement, or in employment situations.

Certainly such discrimination has been widespread for centuries and is today. Why would it be any different when they have new tools?

Seems like a massive amount of effort just to be a dick. They get all the info they could ever want from customer loyalty cards, this is a redundant and frankly useless waste of money.

I think it's unwise to underestimate your fellow humans' propensity to "be a dick", as you put it, even if they don't gain anything more than the satisfaction of treating others poorly.

Facial recognition + a database allows POWERFUL and fine grained discrimination!

Imagine being able to know ${Things} about people -- via analytics / The Internet -- whenever any prospective customer comes into your store.

You could refuse to do business with gay people, divorcees, adulterers, married people, transgender people, politicians, members of the opposing political party or religion, or even police officers with X number of complaints. You could exclude people from the wrong side of town, or who didn't go to the right schools, or whose parents were (or who themselves are) illegal immigrants.

Many of these things are Probably Legal (some are likely not), but most of them strike me as unjust treatment of others. The technology allows frightening things, and there are MANY people who would do so right now if given the ability. (Religious and political boundaries are one such place where people are quite willing to do so.)

I only touched on business owners. Now imagine that roving bands of jerks (or criminals) got their hands on the same technology or data, and could tell who was a stranger in town, or was more vulnerable than others, or fit their desired target criteria. It's pretty scary, and I'm sure that within ten years we'll hear stories of such abuse happening.

> I think it's unwise to underestimate your fellow humans' propensity to "be a dick"...

That tendency exists quite strongly in humans, yes. Unfortunate, but true. On the other hand, businesses also have the tendency to want to make money. If I've got a business, and I make it hard for group X to buy stuff from me, they're probably going to try to find someone else who wants more strongly to make money and/or less strongly to be a jerk. And that business will get their money, and I won't.

And there may be businesses that are okay with that. But it ought to be somewhat of a self-defeating behavior.

Note well: I am not claiming that this behavior is moral or legal.

The criminal aspects mentioned in your last paragraph is quite frightening, and more so because it is also quite probable...

> That tendency exists quite strongly in humans, yes. Unfortunate, but true. On the other hand, businesses also have the tendency to want to make money. If I've got a business, and I make it hard for group X to buy stuff from me, they're probably going to try to find someone else who wants more strongly to make money and/or less strongly to be a jerk. And that business will get their money, and I won't.

Which is true, although there are a few rubs:

1. It's not so easy to start a business, and if the group you exclude are small there's very little [edit - forgot to finish this sentence, sorry] incentive to open a new business just to cater for a small proportion of people. Depends on the business, obviously.

2. You're ignoring any influence other customers have. If 90% of your customers threaten to boycott you because you (bake cakes for gay weddings || print leaflets for republicans) it'd be good business sense to not serve that small percentage of your client base.

With 2, consider a "realistic" situation. In the future, all sex offenders will have their photos published on some public crime database. Cue outrage that sex offenders are being served in the local bar (or choose the establishment of your choice), they are then banned. Are people going to open up bars with the motto "sex offenders welcome here!"? To make people more wary of this, what happens when it thinks you're a sex offender because of a false positive?

I'm always really concerned when people argue that the free market will remove discrimination, and perhaps they're right in the long term but I don't think it's unreasonable to say that there was a fair amount of time when people in the US were discriminated against because of the colour of their skin (not to get into a discussion about now as it's not too relevant).

"And there may be businesses that are okay with that. But it ought to be somewhat of a self-defeating behavior."

This type of libertarian self-solution rarely works. Things do not self-defeat because the affected groups are small and grow slowly. Consider the restricted fly list -- part of it was was government lead but part of it was implementation lead -- companies decided their own filters. Some were horrible -- you selected "Muslim Meal" option and the next thing you know you cant get a boarding pass. Problem is, you dont always have options. If you got restricted form American Airlines, as I did, suddenly you found yourself with half the flight options. If you got flagged again by United, now you were in real trouble...are you going to fly from NY to Charlotte via Detroit?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com