Comment by youpassbutter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by youpassbutter | Hacker News Reader

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> I think the entire foundation for their business is unethical.

Then much of modern business is unethical. What facebook is doing isn't very different from what newspapers do, what tv networks do and what much of tech does.

What do you think ABC, NBC, CBS, etc does? What do you think nytimes, washingtonpost, npr, etc does? What do you think google/youtube does? Even NPR sells "ads" to their corporate sponsors for "donations".

> for the data collecting they have pioneered and continue to do.

You are giving facebook far too much credit. They didn't pioneer anything. They are just the best at it. The business model that facebook excels in certainly predates its existence ( google did it before facebook ) and on a broader scale, predates facebook by decades.

The point should be that facebook should be forced to simply state what they are doing and collecting to each new user and the user should decide whether they want to use facebook's services or not.

Yes, I do think tracking users in the way that is commonplace nowadays is absolutely an ethical issue and I deem it wrong despite its wide spread.

I can buy a newspaper (at least one that still exists in printed form) and read it without being tracked by an invasive marketing machine. Advertisement is not the problem, it's the user tracking. I'd rather Facebook, and yes — Google, ABC, NBC, CBS, WaPo, NPR and so many others go bankrupt than continue on business model that is based on violating the readers' privacy.

Being the best at data collection is pioneering in my book, because it means they are doing it more effectively or at bigger scale than people before them. I am not trying to imply that it's ok for non-Facebook entities to do that, either. Google's data harvesting is absolutely as much of a problem. I referred to Facebook specifically because the parent's linked post did.

> Then much of modern business is unethical.

Well... yeah.

I think they meant that the business model of a hitman specifically, because of, y'know, the killing.

So, the reductio would be demonstrating that the "who pays isn't the same as who 'receives' the thing" isn't a sufficient defense in every case.

In comparing Facebook to newspapers and others scale matters. When you have an addicting service at the scale of Facebook that also has the ability to sway elections or public opinion at the scale they do then it becomes a problem. Requiring disclosure from Facebook is not enough. They need to be heavily regulated.

When I read a newspaper or tune into a radio station they are in no way harvesting my personal information.

What if you visit their websites?

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