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Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

Ignoring scale of emotional reaction here for a moment, do you believe that the actual on-the-ground outcomes of this will be greater or lesser in scope than the Snowden files? I feel like there was a lot of bluster about the government tracking private citizens illegally but nothing really happened. Conversely, this time the wrong political candidate won using social media data, and now we might get some valuable privacy regulation.

The best outcome would be privacy from both private and government, but if I had to choose I'd pick privacy from government. It appears I'm either in the significant minority or it's just easier to kick private corporations than it is to kick the government.

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I don't like the choice.

It's a matter of being ~abused. With analytics, many large companies are so powerful they can manipulate my emotions and decisions. Effectively they can choose what I will do.

It's true that people and small companies have always done that, but I'm on a relatively level playing field with them. With these massive corporations, I can do pretty close to nothing about it.

And in many cases we're talking about companies so big they're as powerful or more powerful that whole countries.

The government could arrest someone I love and hold them under administrative detention because they'd decided "type of person X" is bad for the Party. But Facebook manipulate people's emotions - someone with that kind of power could encourage those who they don't like to commit suicide or acts of terror.

It's not obvious to me that 1984 would have be different if we realised that the Party was democratically elected every four years and had merely manipulated everyone using a private service into voluntarily acting that way.

There's an important difference between corporations and governments. Corporations rarely get a monopoly and in the event that they do they don't last forever. Once a government gets power it almost always keeps it forever.

Consumer tech corporations, do seem to end up with monopolies — and they'll fight, lobby, and pay (through acquisitions) to keep them. It's a complete red-herring to argue that they don't last forever since that's utterly irrelevant to the impact they can have while they are around.

Google's been around for almost 20 years now, FB didn't kill it. FB has been around for 14 years and can sway elections.

If you want privacy from government, then you'll only get it if you can be private from corporations. They basically run things anyway via lobbyists.

FB today can't sway elections any more than CBS of the past could.

You're basically saying that you don't believe advertising (or influence) works at all — which is bullshit.

CBS and its ilk probably made a big difference compared to what was there before (radio?) and FB has has made an even bigger impact since (specifically with respect to scale and ability for fine-grained targeting).

>You're basically saying that you don't believe advertising (or influence) works at all — which is bullshit.

No I'm not. I'm acknowledging that advertising has always worked.

>CBS and its ilk probably made a big difference compared to what was there before (radio?) and FB has has made an even bigger impact since (specifically with respect to scale and ability for fine-grained targeting).

I think you're over-estimating FB's ability to impact elections compared to being one of only 3 television channels. Particularly given the fact that we're not really talking about FB itself impacting the election, but competing parties utilizing the semi-neutral FB platform to advertise.

May Cameron Brown Blair Major Thatcher

That's a lot of change in 30 years to be "forever"

In the u.s

Trump Obama Bush Ii Clinton Bush I

Perspective is everything I guess. For the issues I care about most the difference between those US Presidents is largely cosmetic. So I would have presented them as evidence in my favor.

A key reason they stay in power is because of private companies and people who fund both campaigns, something which America seems to think is fine.

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