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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

For me, it’s because Facebook. They have no track record of trust. I work for a significant Silicon Valley tech company and have seen up close the types of shenanigans that have been attempted by Facebook — especially with their mobile apps. Don’t trust them.

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> They have no track record of trust.

Its worse. They have a consistent track record for asking for trust and then breaking it in most abusive way possible, then issuing a non-apology only after getting caught and then repeating same process all-over again. Oh, I forgot mentioning FB getting rich in the process, so it somehow becomes justified and has zero chance for change.

Aren't all recorded breaches of trust (outside of admittedly predatory data collection schemes endemic to the software industry) the result of unprecedented attacks on social networks as a construct? How would one anticipate such attacks?

I think it's fair to say that Facebook grew too quickly to mitigate the issues inherent to social networks at scale. I don't think that makes them abusive or evil, just naive.

Remember the time they asked for your phone number for 2FA and then used it for contact linking?

There was that one time they conducted a study on emotion manipulation on 700,000 people without informed consent.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-...

From my position, the mobile app shenanigans look like little more than intracompany politics. Where Facebook is not getting data, Apple or Google are still happily collecting.

Overall, I would guess that there is no track record of trust because expectations remain unclear. Concepts of privacy, data usage, and such didn't exist before Facebook and others. I suppose I am not eager to assume malintent outside what is standard for any business operating for the sake of profit.

"Concepts of privacy, data usage, and such didn't exist before Facebook and others."

They did exist before Facebook.

But not before "others", which include every company and person who ever existed. Not sure why you added "and others" to that sentence.

Sorry, yes, that is poorly worded on my part. I meant to say that there is a class of privacy discussion that essentially did not exist prior to the widespread adoption of social media.

We should take away the incentive for these companies to abuse our data.

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