Hacker News Reader

Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

Any of those things would be such massive trust violations that the fallout would almost certainly sink the product and badly tarnish the company. That's not saying a company wouldn't be stupid enough to try it, but it's very clearly a bad business decision - so logically they wouldn't do it.

View on HN

Likely not. Intangible damages rarely matter any more, and companies have become very adept at PR damage control in collusion with the elected representatives. If it doesn't cause huge financial losses or death (in the first world), then it won't sink these behemoths. Public memory outside tech circles in not very long or sharp. The public expectations and standards around privacy and security in particular are hopelessly toothless. The tech has vastly outpaced the understanding of ordinary people, and the "experts" are mostly busy building these systems, not asking themselves if they should. The technological hydra, driven by geopolitical fear and rivalry will sweep everything aside. I constantly hear "if we don't do it, the bad guys will..." even on this forum, and tight regulations, oversight and audits are unwelcome obstacles in this arms race.

Just wait a little. It’s too soon now but then again, I suspect very few people if they were teleported from 20–30 years ago would accept all the privacy violations we take as a fact of life today.

sure, it's company policy not to. but if you do it anyway and don't get caught, your risk-taking will be rewarded, so it becomes a numbers game/informal policy.

That just means we need more than company policy. Regulations w/ teeth and verifiable audits, for example.

Must be completely oblivious to every obscene tech scandal over the past ten years to make a statement like this.

I have given up hope that the wide public cares at all about privacy

Time and time again large companies get outed violating privacy, it hits the news for 5 mins then Trump tweets something stupid and it is all forgotten about

The fact that Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc are all still massive companies with billions in revenue proves the public does not care about privacy

it's absolutely a good business decision, because you place too much value in the bad pr. there is almost none.

facebook has done a crazy number of bad things. a few nerds like me hopped of, and total their user base grew. but nerds like me never had facebook in the first place.

linkedin used your password to log into your emails and download them, then spam people in your contacts with invites, coming from you. then they sold user data to facebook. now their app was caught copying clipboard data from your phone and computer. no one cares, except for me who has a harder time finding work -because i'm not on linked in.

giving you bad flight prices when you're looking for flights? that literally happened. but surprise -you don't remember.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com