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Comment by ponker | Hacker News Reader

Why is this business model usually from Israel?

The business model of watching people's web browsing history and selling them adds? You mean like Jumpshot (through antivirus Avast -- Czech), Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest through their pixels (US), every ad tracking network (US/China/Europe generally), and Google through its search engine history & ad platform (US)?

It feels very unfair to malign Israel here when the majority of surveillance on the web for money is happening in other countries.

Israel is used for ethically questionable stuff many "allies" don't want to do in their own countries. The NSA cannot contact random developers to spy on users, they would be caught yesterday. But it probably isn't antisemitism to state that you can sell any form of security product to more conservative Isrealis.

But yes, saying Isreal does undermine privacy to a disproportionate amount is probably false.

Not only sigint, weapons tests in general are also conveniently outsourced.

It seems pretty reasonable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Download_Valley

I don't have the data, but I definitely think of Israel as being a country where many of these questionable data privacy things originate. Add PIPL to the list, who are a data aggregator and who claim to be in Idaho, where all their management is actually in Israel.

Probably more relaxed attitudes towards intelligence work, because of history.

It's not. What's more common isn't that it's from Israel, but that people bother to mention Israel when that's the home country of the responsible company.

Is it?

Israel is in a state of permanent war, and they can't even trust their traditional allies. It's in their best interests to invest heavily in traditional and cyber warfare, and try to be a step ahead the rest in terms of intelligence.

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