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Comment by tlrobinson | Hacker News Reader

Those are safety/environmental issues. Showing you ads based on your preferences is not.

You could easily argue that tracking users behaviour is a safety issue. But fair enough, how about the loan business, you aren't allowed to charge overly high interest on loans. That's neither a safety or environmental issue.

Predatory interest rates frankly don't concern or particularly bother me. I think, for me, that only becomes a point of concern if a person is simply mentally unfit to make such decisions for themselves. In such cases the general guidance that someone else deemed fit should be responsible for that person's decisions applies, which goes back to the point you made earlier.

Even when those usurious, predatory rates are disproportionately charged to poorer people, who can afford to bear them less? Because that's how it works: price discrimination against the people least able to bear it.

But, hey. Why should I care, if I'm not getting charged those rates, right?

Given that a significant component to the determination of interest rates is risk, I don’t think one could reasonably expect a non-public system of lending to operate any other way.

We’re getting pretty off-topic though, so if you’d like to talk more, go ahead and shoot me an email (r at ovao dot la).

Risk management and predation are categorically different things. If that's not an intuitively obvious notion, I'm not sure what more dialogue will accomplish.

And if those ads tip an election based on psychological pressure points chosen on the basis of your preferences? That's an even bigger risk than safety and environmental issues in my book.

It has been repeatedly demonstrated that machine learning can reliably predict when, for example, a bipolar person is going to enter a manic phase.

Should ad companies be able to model someone's mental illness and show them ads for gambling sites, or whatever, when their brain is acutely more susceptible to them?

I think we're underestimating the global health issue due to online advertisement (alcohol, smoking, or just bad eating habits). And I'm not speaking of attention disorder of so-called 'multitask kids' caused by social media that have business models based on ads, and do everything to grab your attention

If you believe Apple and Microsoft's CEOs, privacy is a human right, so I suppose that would put it up there.

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