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Comment by fbelzile | Hacker News Reader

Instead of regulation, maybe have browsers give you a warning on how the site your about to visit treats your personal data?

We already have warnings in one way or another for: expired SSL certificates, lack of HTTPS, potential malware sites, if your account may have been breached (at least in Firefox), requests for your location or to show notifications, etc.

The next logical step is to have our user agent warn us about sites that have bad reputation for protecting your data.

I use the DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials, which gives a letter grade based off of the trackers used and terms of service analysis from tosdr.org, in your browser toolbar. You can get it from here:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/duckduckgo-privacy...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-fo...

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I like this idea, every website should have a popup warning you that it uses cookies and data. Maybe a politician older than my dad could come up with a regulation to enforce this, give it a catchy name like Governments Drunk Popup Regulation.

Education is a good idea but in reality every site with google analytics is invading your personal data and people don't really care.

I don't like the idea of my browser trying to protect me from social problems. I'm fine with my browser warning me that a site may be a risk to my machine, but I wouldn't trust my browser to display content to me reliably if my vendor was using it as a platform for any activism that isn't narrowly focused on keeping web standards open.

Perhaps I'd tolerate it as an opt-in, but even then, I'd be leary and start looking to switch because I think it's a bad precident to set, and (slippery slope warning) could go toward normalizing similar warnings for other issues.

If there's going to be a warning, I think it ought to be produced server-side.

Browsers are already opt-in; you can download another. Laws are a bit more difficult to change.

>> There should be only one regulation for fb, display following warning on all pages/screens: Statutory Warning: This product is specifically designed to cause behavioral addiction so you are guided down a slippery slope of over consumption & that is how this company makes money. Overuse of this product is known to cause - anxiety, depression, low self esteem, constant craving for attention, short attention spans, inability to concentrate on tasks, inhibited social development in the real world & possibly general "unhappiness", especially among the young & impressionable.

> Instead of regulation, maybe have browsers give you a warning on how the site your about to visit treats your personal data?

That wouldn't work. Facebook may see browser warnings like that as an existential threat. In response, they could create their own browser and heavily push it on users, a la Google & Chrome.

Sounds great to me! We need more competition in the browser market.

They would just use the chrome engine so we would be no better off.

Really happy firefox is alive and well.

> Sounds great to me! We need more competition in the browser market.

I'm almost certain that a Facebook browser would end up being Chromium with tight Facebook integration and extra-invasive data collection.

If Microsoft made the decision that it was too much work to maintain an independent browser engine and they already had one, I find it highly unlikely that Facebook would come to a different decision, given they're starting even farther behind.

They've already done that. They're called the Facebook and Messenger native apps for Android and iOS. Conveniently, the Facebook mobile web app shows you Messenger notifications but won't let you read them without installing the native Messenger app, or visiting the Facebook on a desktop browser, despite the fact that direct messages have a much simpler interface than the rest of Facebook and that it used to be possible to view messages in the mobile web app, so they push for native app usage pretty hard already.

I'm not sure they'd see desktop browser warnings as much of an existential threat considering 94% of their advertising revenue comes from mobile [1].

[1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2019/Q2...

I haven't used Facebook in a couple years but mbasic.facebook.com used to let you see your messages.

It still does

Thanks! I had no idea.

Here I would distinguish between "bad reputation for protecting your data" and "literally dies if they don't sell it constantly".

And how are you going to force browsers to do that, if not through regulation?

What about mobile apps? Gotta get OS makers in that too. Put Google and Apple and all the Android variations there.

Plus there’s FB own devices, like Portal and HTC First.

Just adding my two cents regarding the DDG extension/add-on. I use it with Firefox and it works pretty brilliantly.

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