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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

It's really weird.

I don't think the "threat" is the obvious one... Nobody trusts Facebook -- many, if not most, people honestly believe they listen to their conversations already. The real message is how emotional and immature the leadership is to a perceived slight.

A message that said "Cigarettes will kill you" didn't stop smokers, and some label won't stop Facebook users or meaningfully impact Facebook. Hell, when Microsoft faced anti-trust breakup, the company didn't sit and whine. They fought the threat and sold billions of dollars of software and solutions to their antagonist.

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I'm not sure "Cigarettes will kill you" was ever meant to stop smokers from smoking. It was part of a generations long campaign to change the entire perception and culture behind smoking. And it seems to be working very well.

I think there are parallels here. I see a focus on getting _current_ users to stop tolerating naked privacy. I think that ship has sailed. But in time the entire culture can shift where future generations do not accept naked privacy.

I think people forget how ubiquitous smoking was. I remember back in the 80s, you basically couldn't go anywhere without ending up stinking like an ashtray. And it was even worse decades earlier before I was born. Everyone bellyached as anti-smoking laws kicked in, but slowly, attitudes changed, and now, it's not such a big deal. I bet if you got rid of anti-smoking laws, you wouldn't even see a huge uptake in public smoking or smoking in workplaces these days, because people's minds have been changed and there are a lot fewer smokers.

I remember back in the 80s, you basically couldn't go anywhere without ending up stinking like an ashtray.

Can confirm. I visited many a windowless office in Manhattan where everyone smoked, and air circulation was nil.

Fixing electronics in those days always started with swabbing a thick layer of tar off the circuit boards.

It's probably hard to fathom now but while working at Chevron in 1990 / 1991 the two smokers in my group got their own office so no one else had to share with them while they smoked at their respective desks. Thankfully they kept the door closed, but any time you had to go in there everything - the walls, the ceiling, their keyboards and monitors, their books - everything had an odiferous brown patina. It was like walking into a bar. The fact that last comparison no longer really works tells me how much the world has changed for the better.

I had to do some work at a customer datacenter, which was a converted print/mainframe room in a 70s high-rise with lots of windows.

The customer had built a wall blocking all of the windows in the late 80s (this was circa 2000), we had to go in the the area inbetween.... 10-15 years of no interior cleaning and high temps resulted in these weird formations of tar drips. It almost looked like a cave formation. Absolutely vile.

The story from the site staff was that the print and mainframe operators back in the day would essentially sit and continuously smoke, all day, all night. IIRC, we found a half dozen defunct cigarette machines.

Hahahhaah. That's cool and disgusting at the same time. A former coworker shared with me he was tasked to investigate why the mainframe was throwing errors only at night. He discovered a couple of operators were rolling a couple and then disconnecting the air ducting to the mainframe to use as a covert way to vent their own exhaust.

Totally, but look at how smart (and evil) the tobacco companies were. They pivoted between strategies in smart ways.

Once reality started setting in and denial didn't cut it, they acted to protect the shareholders. Phillip Morris bought things like Kraft that they could spin-out later. They settled claims and paid states billions of dollars for healthcare costs a few years before healthcare started going up 30% a year... which capped their liability AND made it politically impossible to put them out of business.

Google seems to at least attempt to do something similar by entering and investing billions into businesses like Cloud, cars, etc. I don't see that with Facebook... Facebook digs in and spouts some nonsense about connecting people, like the capitalist version of Soviet PR people.

Well, I'm by no means defending Facebook's business, but they did open-source a couple little projects called React, GraphQL, and PyTorch (and a bunch of other lesser-known stuff), so technically it's not _all_ bad. :P

The point isn't doing good, the point is having multiple viable lines of business. No one does that better than Microsoft - they have, what, a dozen billion dollar products now? Google is trying but has this far been less successful, and Facebook isn't even really trying at all. The closest they have is Oculus, but hardware isn't going to cut it.

It won’t cause Facebook to go bankrupt (less well-targeted ads can still be sold but aren’t worth as much), but it will meaningfully impact them. Most high level Facebook employees have significant amounts of Facebook stock. Even the implication that Facebook’s ad revenue will decrease is going to lower their stock price. So of course they are going to try to prevent this change- if it becomes permanent they are taking a hit to their retirement savings.

If Android follows suit (not guaranteed but iOS and Android often converge on features within a few versions of each other), then they are going to take another hit. Executives want to prevent this change in the interest of their personal wealth.

While I welcome the change as an iOS user (for privacy with my other apps, I don’t even have a Facebook account) I can understand why Facebook is coming out hard against the change.

>If Android follows suit (not guaranteed but iOS and Android often converge on features within a few versions of each other), then they are going to take another hit. Executives want to prevent this change in the interest of their personal wealth.

Google might be incentivized to do it, as doing so would harm the effectiveness of other ad networks without affecting their own (as long as the user has a Google account)

Facebook’s attempts to legally challenge Apples UX changes seem fruitless, but they would definitely have a case against Google if they tried to pull this to benefit their ad network and data collection efforts over Facebook’s.

>if it becomes permanent they are taking a hit to their retirement savings.

This would be amazing. Imagine all the talent that would be freed into real problems.

BTW: I remember while working in the financial sector, in the financial bubble, how terrified they were if markets were to be corrected, like they did.

> if it becomes permanent they are taking a hit to their retirement savings.

poor little snow flakes. i have zero sympathy

The real message is how emotional and immature the leadership is to a perceived slight

It's very telling that personal privacy has Facebook's leadership fudging its collective Huggies, while every other company — even Google — is going along with it.

Google has avoid updating their iOS apps for months to avoid putting privacy labels on them.

To be fair, they have now started to do it.

One unexplored possibility is that they actually needed to do quite a bit of analysis to determine all the uses the data is put to within their organization and doing a legal review so that they didn’t end up making a false statement.

(I think you meant antagonist?)

Thank you!

> A message that said "Cigarettes will kill you" didn't stop smokers

That's the opposite of true. It didn't stop _every_ smoker, but research has established that anti-smoking marketing and labeling has a massive impact on how many people smoke overall.

> The real message is how emotional and immature the leadership is to a perceived slight.

I don't agree with this. It seems less of an emotional response than a business one: the changes from iOS will have a large, material impact on Facebook's business, and it will get even worse if other gatekeepers follow suit (not likely, as Google's model is pretty close to Facebook's).

I think the real takeaway is how much money is riding on surveillance capitalism, and how these business models take a real hit when you just explain clearly to the user what's going on and give them a choice.

>A message that said "Cigarettes will kill you" didn't stop smokers

Nicotine is as hard to quit as heroin. The fact that we still punished smokers through public shaming, exclusion and excessive fines just shows how unsympathetic our culture is to perceived "moral failings."

https://www.heart.org/en/news/2018/10/17/why-its-so-hard-to-...

Yes, it is odd that many who deem shaming an effective strategy where smoking is concerned deem it ineffective and counter-productive for obesity, narcotic addition, and other undesirable behaviors.

Well I've kicked heroin but not nicotine. Not because the nicotine is more addictive, but because its harms are orders of magnitude less. I've tried both and I would rather go cold-turkey off nicotine than a strong opiate.

I agree 100% with the "perceived moral failings" part. Shaming people does not help. I couldn't kick the H until I stopped shaming myself. The guilt made my usage worse. It was caused by complex mental health issues, dealing with those got me healthy.

The whole ordeal has made me a much more understanding, compassionate person. I'm extremely grateful to be one of the few that made it out.

Ex-smoker here.

So, what do you advocate? Reward smokers? Encourage smoking?

Perhaps we should advocate consistency. Either shaming and punishment works to discourage unwanted behaviour or it doesn't. If it does, then perhaps we should start shaming obese people and crack addicts.

P.S. Before the downvotes come, I'm rather fat and a mostly ex-smoker, so I'm not attacking obese people, just wondering at the inconsistency.

I think the two are not quite equivalent. Smoking is the action, while obesity is the condition. The equivalent would be shaming smokers for getting cancer or shaming obese people for overeating (to nitpickers: yes, this is a simplification).

The main difference seems to be that smoking in public inflicts secondhand smoke on others, while obesity inflicts... taking up more room on public transit? IF shaming is effective at curbing public smoking, and there is no shaming for smoking in private, then I think you could have a logically consistent position.

I don't know if the first of those is true, and the second definitely isn't (although maybe a different level of intensity), so I'm not saying there is consistency, just that it's possible.

We can all agree that "shaming" is not good; but at the same time we should not promote/encourage behaviors that leads to negative outcomes.

So, generic "smoke is bad for you", "overeating is bad for you", "junk food is bad for you"; and positive reinforcements like "say no to smoke", "say no to junk food" would be a good start.

And if some groups comes out and state that those messages are "shaming" well, those people are idiots.

P.S.: ex-smoker and ex-fat person here

>and positive reinforcements like "say no to smoke", "say no to junk food" would be a good start.

I mean why do people feel it's their duty to get into someone else's life? How about assume fat people and people who smoke know it's bad for them and just leave them alone. I think people in society would be much better off of they worried themselves with their own lives. I guess that's a lot harder than pointing out other people's problems though.

> we should start shaming obese people and crack addicts

Where do you live where obese people and crack addicts are not shamed?

Don't we already shame obese people?

Maybe as a society we should quit our Spanish Inquisition style moral crusades.

I wasn't expecting that ...

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