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Comment by rhino369 | Hacker News Reader

Why not ban browser companies, operating system companies, computer/phone companies, email providers, etc. too?

We should ban collecting tons if info about people, for all companies, period. We won't, because banks and CC companies are very into doing that and the politicians love them, but we should.

No. Because many businesses rely on data available. FAANG would be out of business then.

If FAANG business depends on data which should be private then FAANG should be out of business.

I worked at Amazon, which has a ton of data about your shopping habits that allow them to make targeted decisions on a customer's behalf. You know what? The vast majority of that data (at the time) came from observing customer behavior on properties owned by Amazon.

In my mind, that's perfectly reasonable - what I do within the boundaries of their business is our shared interaction and we both have the opportunity to make decisions based on those interactions. The major exception for Amazon is affiliate links, which, for the business i was in, weren't used as data sources.

Apple is not significantly different. Between Apple and me, who else knows our business and what does Apple know about me outside of my interactions with them (maybe more now with Apple Pay).

For the most part, Netflix is the same. Sure they know what I watch, but why does that matter if they're only using it to improve their own business and make programming choices?

Google and Facebook, on the other hand, blanket the internet with tracking beacons, read my email, keep shadow profiles (I don't have a facebook account, never have had one, but I'm sure they know more about me than I'd like), eavesdrop on conversations (I suppose Amazon is in that business now, too), track locations, steal contact data, trick people training their ML algos, etc. As is said, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.", FB and Google have far more than that and a single bad actor with access to that data could make life extremely difficult for just about anyone in the world.

Yeah, good. I value my privacy far more than somebody's profit.

"Businesses rely on being shitty so we can't outlaw being shitty or they might have to find a way to operate without being shitty, or else stop operating" isn't really convincing me.

AAN actually sell stuff other than hyper-targeted ads. F and G (and AAN) still can sell ads, just less targeted ones. They would suffer a bit (or a bit more), but not outright be forced out of business. And same goes for most if not all other FAANG-tier companies not explicitly included in that acronym.

As for the "improving service" angle, e.g. Netflix could ask if it's OK to collect history to improve/personalize recommendations.

And a lot of "improvements" and metrics do not really need detailed data collection per person anyway. Collecting anonymous data in broader groupings is often quite fine. E.g. "Strange Things is really popular our total-views counter says ergo order a new season". There is no need for Netflix to know exactly who specifically watched the show to make such a decision.

Is this a generational thing, or an industry-you're-in blindness thing? Or both? We had an economy, and even advertising (so, so much of it) before spyvertising was such a huge thing. It was fine. The sky did not fall. For some reason there's a set of people who seem to think it'll be the end of the world if we stop letting companies operate private dragnet spy operations.

I didn't see this before I posted my reply. I'm so glad I'm not the only one who is seeing this. I would go so far as instead of saying:

> It was fine.

To say that "it was better", because there was more competition.

That's a keen insight, that it might be a "generational thing". I remember things, in general, working better before the Shermann Antitrust Act stopped applying to technology companies.

> Netflix could ask if it's OK to collect history to improve/personalize recommendations.

If they ask for the data for that purpose, then they should only be allowed to use the data for that purpose.

Businesses relying on collecting data without explicit permission should go out of business.

This is absolutely false.

This isn't true of Facebook. This isn't true of Apple. This isn't true of Amazon. This isn't true of Netflix. Google... likely they would be wounded, but it definitely wouldn't make them go out of businesses.

Only if they fail to adapt. And if they can't adapt, then good riddance. The history books are littered with examples of huge corporations that failed to adapt then died. FAANG isn't special.

I don't understand comments like this. I see this sentiment adopted, and echoed by so many really smart people who should know better. They talk about FAANG like they're essential services, like the food supply, or water. Almost as if it's not a real option for ANY business to fail or be overtaken by a competitor. Regardless of their current size and scope, if they all disappeared over the course of a month, do you honestly think nothing would rise up to take their places almost immediately? I mean, I would definitely move a product or two to market and attempt fill some of the demand left in their wake. Wouldn't you?

The solution to all of this buying and selling of information is simpler than we all think. We will be creating a credit reporting type agency but for data privacy. This will tell us who pulled your information as a credit reporting agency does when you sign up for a Credit Card. Now to what extent does it disclose what what captured we as citizens will have to stand up and fight for that.

Not only that, but credit card companies, banks, tv providers, insurance agencies, charities, service providers, political organizations, _every business I interact with_. Unless I explicitly provide permission, why should any business I interact with be able to sell information about that transaction to another business that is unrelated to the transaction?

This is one _huge_ advantage to cash in the current market, but that doesn't apply to the dozens of other ways companies are tracking people.

Every journey begins with a single step.

Why not just nip it in the bud and unplug the physical infrastructure of the WWW?

This is exactly it. The reason tech companies are so big on supporting regulations against ISPs is because those rules are narrowly carved out to not apply to them, eliminating a large chunk of their competition.

Imagine if this law also applied to Google and Facebook, and they couldn't charge more when you opt out of their data collection?

To use a physical analogy, ISPs are like roads. Google and Facebook are like places you can drive to on the roads.

You argument is essentially that it is not right to ban persuasive surveillance on the roads if it is possible for people to use those roads to reach destinations where surveillance is allowed.

That analogy is completely arbitrary though, and only drawn to serve tech companies' interests. Because Facebook and Google are platforms, not end destinations in themselves.

In your analogy, perhaps the ISPs are the highways, and tech companies are the neighborhood streets, but they're both roads. Because you're not trying to get to Facebook, you're trying to get to your grandma's photo album, that unfortunately you can only get to through Facebook.

You can only get to grandma's photo album because she put it on Facebook. She could have put it on Flickr, or iCloud, or numerous other places.

No matter which she chooses, though, to get to it a large number of people only have one choice for high speed internet access to go through.

ISPs are low level infrastructure tied to specific geographical locations. If you don't like the infrastructure where you live then generally you only way to pick something better is to move to another region.

If you don't like your photo hosting site, or you blog hosting site, or you online backup site, or your stock tracking site, etc., an alternative is a URL change away.

That's why different regulatory handling of ISPs and the places you reach through those ISPs makes sense.

Facebook is more like a bar or club or church in the physical world analogy than it is like a street. You go there to interact with other people who go there, but it is a destination, competing with other destinations that those people could meet at instead.

That said, Facebook does offer communication services, and so some regulation of communication services that makes sense would make sense to apply to both them and ISPs.

"an alternative is a URL change away" isn't really a true statement. You can move off of Facebook, but you can't move your friends and family off of Facebook. You can use a YouTube alternative to watch videos, but all the videos you want to watch are not going to be there.

Pretending platforms are a wholly different thing than infrastructure, and easily switchable seems willfully ignorant of the real world. Moving platforms is almost as difficult as moving real world locations. And popular opinion aside, most people have two or more ISP options. (I have three wired residential ISPs here, two offering gigabit connections, and at least four wireless carriers.)

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