Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomc1985 | Hacker News Reader

tomc1985

I once showed up to one of those MIT Biz-Tech mixers a few years ago and one of the presentations we had to sit through was an almost appalling peek at one of these tracking systems through the eyes of its enthusiastic business owner.

Afterwords we had time for open questions, and I joined the line. When it became my turn, I asked the owner about whether he had any ethical or moral qualms about what he was doing and he just laughed. He gathers data from hidden interactions with client websites (fashion brands, for this demo) to quite literally 'follow the customer around' and 'influence their purchasing decisions'. He was quite proud of just how deep into his shoppers' lives his product was integrated.

When I looked around the room during the height of this exchange, most everyone seemed indifferent and only a few seemed to acknowledge or validate my arguments. It was a supremely disappointing and depressing experience.

View on HN

> When I looked around the room during the height of this exchange, most everyone seemed indifferent and only a few seemed to acknowledge or validate my arguments

It was the same thing, pre-crisis, in finance. "Of course I screwed him on pricing! He isn't my customer, he's a counterparty. He should have expected I'd screw him."

When an industry is making money to society's detriment, it will not fix itself.

I work in finance, for a dark pool. Our "value add" is to provide the anonymity to both buyers and sellers (both in who they are, the side they're on and their limit) while doing minimal disturbance to the market. We only disseminate the symbol on an IOI, and we don't quote prices, at all. We facilitate moving large block trades with minimal information leakage to market et large while abiding by NMS rules. Effectively, we run blind auctions for large blocks of US traded equities.

What are you trying to say? You add tremendous value for large customers who have the ability to not let everyone on a lit exchange know what they are doing. Actually from what I've heard more than 54% of all stock transactions are on on unlit alternative trading venues.

How is that related to the parent comment? Those trades pre-GFC weren't on dark pools, that was mostly voice (over-the-phone trading).

I think the point here is either that

1) industries can evolve to no longer be predatory against their own customers/consumers of their services, or

2) just because one sector participant is behaving in immoral behaviour doesn’t mean all are, and labelling the entire industry as corrupt as a result may not be fair.

In you position, you are privy to a lot of information about your customers identities and order sizes before the order is executed. Do you sell this information to other customers? Because if you did, your example would be comparable to what's being discussed here.

Even if they didn't sell this information wholesale via data brokerages, your argument leaves open wiggle-room for claiming innocence while still monetizing the information via selling aggregate data.

This is something that is wholly uncovered in this whole debacle -- aggregate data (aka "anonymized" data ) is the cake beneath the icing. While Facebook et al may play nicely with regulators (and the general public) by quickly backing away from wholesale "unfiltered" data access, they can skirt the rules by providing "researchers" with anonymized data.

All of them want this anonymized data for their own analytics reporting to measure success metrics and most will walk away when the spigot is closed.

> they can skirt the rules by providing "researchers" with anonymized data.

Probably, given the many past cases of academics using this kind of data to demonstrate de-anonymization attacks, with some very special vetting of who the researchers are and where their loyalties lie.

Here's a decent writeup of their first big research-related privacy blunder: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Harvards-Privacy-Meltdown/...

Thanks for sharing and this in many ways captures the central contradiction of our societies.

People often talk about ethics and values when they expect it from others or wider society. Yet they often fail to act in ethical ways when it comes to them and somehow manage the dissonance.

Our current system incentivizes profit over all else and many will respond to this. If our system rewards unethical behavior we should not be surprised with the results. Regulations around safety, environmental, labour and other ethical issues have to be put in place to temper the worst impulses. If slavery was legal many would be willing justify it as long as they gained from it.

We will have to regulate and disallow micro targeting that drives this insatiable need to stalk users and hoover data to build incredibly invasive profiles. And unless something is done it will keep getting worse.

It's almost as if the incentives of capitalism are inherently exploitative

when the capital is borrowed then another party needs to earn a return which amps up the exploitation and justification... i.e. I need to pay back my investors and also pay myself.

What do you mean, "when"? This makes it sound like we could fix Capitalism by banning banks and investors or something. They're inherent to this system. Institutionalized loans were a corner stone when Capitalism emerged a couple of centuries back in Europe. If we want to organize society differently, we should have a honest and broad debate about that rather than focusing on one aspect / one group of supposedly bad actors.

True, I think there are specific organizational structures that allow or encourage exploitation and they are not limited to capitalism. imho, when people need to please another with power over them they more readily justify their actions when they exploit others. Institutionalized loans seem a step removed from this as there is less opportunity for influence from the powers that be.

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's the other way around!

Can we possibly have discussions without them devolving into false dichotomies between two or three ideologies? It may come as a shock to some, but it’s not all about crony capitalism or Marxism, there are other options, hybridized options, and room for new thinking. It’s stultifying to see every critique of what the US laughingly calls the free market devolve into people screaming “Communism then, haha! Mao and Stalin killed 100 million!”

Can we at least pretend to argue in good faith?

> there are other options, hybridized options,

If you put economies on a line between free markets and communism, the economies do better the closer they are to free markets.

> and room for new thinking.

About every mix has been tried already, and the results are clear.

no one is forcing anyone to buy shit. i'm on the internet all day browsing all sorts of sites and all of these companies are completely powerless wrt to me. you know why? because i haven't bought anything except underwear from amazon and groceries from my local supermarket in about 9 months.

An anecdote is not data.

I'm glad to hear that you aren't influenced by these tech giants, but the problem is that most people are. When these tech companies can greatly influence elections and popular opinion, we should question their morals and decide how much personal data they should be able to access.

I understand your point, but people are volunteering to give up this information. At some point, grandma has to learn to stop calling the psychic hotline.

Explaining to grandma that she’s wasting money calling a premium rate number is relatively easy, and if she ignores you, the impact to society is minimal.

How do you explain to grandma that publishing photos of her grandkids is to the detriment to society as a whole?

Does grandma brag in front of the tax collectors about how much her children are making? Does grandma rat out the grandkids partying too hard to their parents? Grandma isn't stupid, grandma can keep secrets, but no one explained to her that Facebook isn't a benevolent entity. Her perception of Facebook is a cozy digital dining room where she can talk to the friends and family that don't have time to visit anymore.

I think it's important to remember that Facebook provides a service people really want, which makes it hard to convince them to mistrust it.

Is it OK for a business to collect and sell their customers' personal information if their customers didn't knowingly agree to it? These tech companies are hiding their intentions in the fine print and it's clear that their users don't understand what their personal data is used for. We can't expect the average person to spend 10 minutes [0] reading and trying to understand the legalese on every app or website they sign up for.

Most countries have consumer protection laws to protect the rights of customers and stop deceptive business practices. When a significant portion of a company's customers feel deceived, it's easy to see that the company is not being honest to their customers.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/readi...

Oh, yeah? I bet you think you picked the brands you bought, too.

brands of what? milk? eggs? cheesy crackers?

That's your behavior in commerce, sure. How were your political and social views nudged?

Your point is moot, if advertising had absolutely no effect on customers, then it would not be profitable to use it and the industry would not exist.

In fairness certain types of advertising have very little roi but continues to be used because of past association or the network effect.

Advertising is also for services and websites and political campaigns, universities, clubs, schools and charities not just consumer goods. Many of these actors benefit from having targeted advertising, just because you are not buying consumer goods does not mean a profile of your online activity is not being created and sold to advertisers used by these various groups.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com