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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

You know what? I know that scraping is currently legal, but then we end up with things like that company or Clearview AI. We need some laws, ASAP, prohibiting data for being scraped for specific reasons.

Also, I have some friends in insurance companies, and they say that the insurance companies right now are actively trying to learn how to scrape people's social media - secretly - so they can catch "dangerous" behavior or violations of their rules. My dad's client was telling how there was a guy who was running a happy hour secretly in his insured bar, and his company which scraped Facebook found posts from other people saying "great happy hour at this bar", he reported it to the insurance company, and they sent the bar the bill. That's freaky and should be illegal as a violation of privacy.

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> You know what? I know that scraping is currently legal, but then we end up with things like that company or Clearview AI. We need some laws, ASAP, prohibiting data for being scraped for specific reasons.

I don't think there's anything about scraping that makes this disgusting. It would be equally bad if individual people uploaded compromising photos of their exes.

The issue here is that people need control — not ownership — over their image and personal data/information. (The difference I intend to draw between control and ownership, is that the legal notion of control would be written in such a way that the fine print is irrelevant. Most online systems have some fine print somewhere giving the site owner certain rights over your content. Such fine print about a person's image needs to be rendered such a risk that if a business owner suggests including something like that to a lawyer, the lawyer starts quivering in their boots. "If I include such a clause, I will never get paid, because within half a nanosecond of it being visible you will be sued into kingdom come and your great grandchildren will still be paying off your debts."

I think I get the tech side of this and how creepy it is to be caught that way. But what is nefarious or needs to be secret about a "happy hour"? Isn't that just a promotional event for bars/restaurants where discount food/drink sales for some period?

Edit: Maybe I get it. It seems certain states have made it illegal to run "happy hours", presumably because people drink too much and behave badly. https://spoonuniversity.com/place/why-did-these-8-states-mak...

In some places, like Massachusetts, happy hours (happys hour?) are illegal, I think the on the theory that they promote binge drinking.

Even if it’s not illegal in that State, it’s also possible that the insurer deemed it to be a higher risk and would have just charged a higher premium.

If the bar owner didn’t want to pay that higher premium but did want to run a happy hour at his bar, and told the insurance company that he didn’t have happy hours at his bar, then well, he lied to the insurance company. They could have found out another way, by sending a mook down the way, but this saved labor and expense claims, and maybe even on their own insurance bills if something happened to the mook in the bar during the happy hour.

By the way, just pointing out another hypothetical here; we don’t have sufficient information to be making judgement calls on that specific situation.

God forbid people are happy for an hour, we've got to raise their insurance premiums. You know in Indiana, it's actually not even legal to have any happy hour promotions wherein the drinks are cheaper but only during a certain window. If you want to make people happy with drink specials, you have to offer them the same drink special all day long. (And so that's how we do...)

Happy hour here is just when you can get a $2 cheeseburger, or $0.50 wings on special. I had never even considered something like a happy hour being reflected on your insurance premium.

I don't think it's freaky at all, I do find it freaky that there's people who will choose fraud over code as soon as code was anywhere in the loop that caught the fraud.

Yes - because where does it end? China, which has surveillance on anything and everything? I don't want to live in a society where everything is monitored by people I don't know and haven't heard of secretly, and neither I think do you.

Remember, this wasn't the insurance company that was spying. This was a data broker whom you've never heard of, who scrapes social media pages, and gets paid by insurance companies for reports. A bounty hunter using computers and scraping. That's dystopian.

Customers using their speech to praise your business, in the process revealing you committed fraud, and the insurance company hearing the customers, is not "China".

If all this speech was in a central repository by government mandate, I agree it's China

It's more that I don't think it's the damn business of any private, nameless entity to scrape my social media posts and collect them in a secret database. I signed up for _Facebook_ and their privacy policy, not for anonymous people who can affect me in the real world without due process to save all of my posts and harvest information about me from them. And then link it to all of my profiles from LinkedIn and elsewhere across the internet into one central database they can sell people and my insurance company, because make no mistake that's what they do.

> Yes - because where does it end? China, which has surveillance on anything and everything?

The anti-Chinese rhetoric on HN is starting to grate.

You don't live in the DPRC. How do you know what China does with surveillance if any?

> You don't live in the DPRC. How do you know what China does with surveillance if any?

The same way we know what happened with the SS or the Stazi - lots of detailed evidence, first hand accounts, reports from other intelligence agencies etc.

The thing is, the people you mention have a bone to pick. Its like taking edward snowdens view of America over say...cardi b

I am concerned that the type of defense of privacy exemplified by your argument (that reporting the happy hour to the insurance company was a privacy violation and should be illegal) will backfire sooner or later.

Assuming that the guy was running a happy hour in a place where they are banned, your argument reinforces the view that privacy is only needed for those who break the law.

Explaining why privacy is important is hard enough as it is. Please don't make it harder.

> running a happy hour secretly in his insured bar

Can you explain what this means and why it is a problem? --Confused

Not OP, but a happy hour is usually a period of time when bars serve discounted drinks and such.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_hour

It's illegal in several States. It was only made legal here a couple of years ago.

>The reason for each ban varies, but include: to prevent drunk driving, avoid the nuisance to neighbors from loud crowds and public drunkenness, and to discourage unhealthy consumption of a large amount of alcohol in a short time.

I did not realize happy hours were so contentious. Call it the California bubble.

Yeah, it was a big deal when they made it legal here. Bars, restaurants everywhere started doing them like immediately. Now it's rare to find a place that doesn't offer some kind of happy hour special.

Gotta say, I haven't really noticed any of the problems occuring that the wiki article mentions was the reasoning behind most bans myself. Haven't seen any news reports about those things since the laws changed either or anything.

That's a little bit symptomatic of your biases. Laws against happy hours are far more a bible belt thing in reality than a nanny state thing (even if some of the reasons touted publicly are nanny state-ish).

Happy hour is when drinks go on a huge discount for a set time period. You get a lot more seriously drunken people since it encourages binge drinking. I would assume that just carries a higher insurance premium to have one.

[deleted, wrong post]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2019/09/10/linke...

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