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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Because nothing good can come of that.

That depends on how you define "good"

Even if you're trolling, I suppose you're technically correct in that this is "good" for stalker-rapists, and maybe analysts of the cam-modeling industry.

I am only half trolling. In your "nothing good will come out of it" you seem to imply that "good" means "good for society" or something like that. A lot of people in the world understand "good" as "personally profitable and/or enjoyable". So yeah, you can say that nothing good will come out of using this data, but a whole lot of people out there are going to disagree with that.

As a society we have decided that there are objective good and objective bad. While in your view all may be an amusing intellectual experiment, society at large considers stalking, and other crimes that could arise here, to be objectively bad whether or not the perp derives some pleasure from it.

"As a society we have decided that there are objective good and objective bad"

If we have decided something, it is not very objective, is it? There is a difference between truth and consensus.

Nothing good comes out from playing videogames either, or archiving pictures of WWII guns, or ...

Collecting information (which is public by the way) is just yet another hobby, which can be used for good (training an ML algorithm), bad (annoying someone), or just be neutral (sitting in someone's archive). It does not mean that you use it to ruin someone's life.

Also, there is nothing wrong with stalking people, as long as you do not interact with them, let them know, or affect them in any way.

Stalking is a crime. Even if you do not interact with people. Building up files about private individuals without their consent is a crime.

Citation very much needed in the United States.

Why does discussion need to be limited to the United States?

It doesn't but this discussion is about an event in the United States, so an unqualified statement about what is a crime will be interpreted that way.

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