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Comment by gyardley | Hacker News Reader

It's perfectly possible for Facebook to not track users at the moment and simultaneously prepare for a future where this is not only acceptable, it's expected.

Facebook has placed a long-term bet that people will willingly share pretty much everything they do. When they file patents like this, they're skating where the puck is headed, not where it is now.

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Yeah. It's also possible, and indeed true, that Facebook is lying through its teeth, aggressively tracking now while claiming not to, introducing ever-more-pervasive and invasive tracking without notifying users or giving them an informed choice in the matter, thus forcibly paving the way for the future that will place them in the most powerful position.

Let's be real. Facebook has not "placed a long-term bet"; they are actively engineering that reality right now, despite loud and frequent objections from users.

If Facebook is "lying through its teeth" it will only hurt them in the long run. What is even more realistic is that they are getting (have become) so big that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. That becomes typical in a large organization.

This could also simply be a way for them to protect themselves in the future, as we've all seen just how heated the patent space is becoming for the big boys...

> If Facebook is "lying through its teeth" it will only hurt them in the long run.

Because after all, we see corporations being punished every day for lying by the powerful and effective consumer protection organizations in the United States.

Hmmm... I never made any such claims about consumer protection organizations. This is something you've conjured up on your own.

The bottom line is, if this is something we (the users) do not want, we have the power to make Facebook change it. We've seen examples of this in the past with Facebook (ex: their friend recommended ad's).

I don't believe we can rely on our government run organizations to wholly protect us, nor have I made any such claim. But we sure as hell can vote what we want and don't want, from a private company, through our buying and/or usage patterns.

See this for why your thesis that the market will naturally reject this is probably wrong, even if it's abhorrent to them now:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

It's very easy for liberties/expectations to be eroded imperceptibly until they're gone and people think that's the norm because that's the way things are, and everyone seems to be OK with it.

It's very easy to see why that's a problem. But it should be equally easy to see the long-term results when we attempt to use the strength of government to ensure market outcomes. It doesn't take long for the regulatory agency to wind up working for the goals of the very entities they're intended to police. This is called Regulatory Capture, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture .

This isn't a problem of bad politicians or people not trying hard enough to solve the problems. It's fundamentally implied by the nature of the beast. We need to have experts in the role of regulators; but where do experts come from, except from experience as past workers in those industries? This is all basic public choice economic theory. No amount of voting for the right candidates, or carefully crafting the regulations is going to get around the problem.

Yep, there are problems there too, the point of my post was to refute the parent's opinion that the market would naturally take care of it.

I'm afraid I don't have a good solution short of some way of screening for only people who are allergic to cronyism.

Thanks for the link on Regulatory capture, I didn't realize that that phenomenon had a name, but I'm glad it does. It's one of the more infuriating things about the US government and the SEC in particular when it seems to handle lots of things with kid gloves when they should be prosecuting them with all the zeal they seem to have for prosecuting minor drug dealers.

I don't believe the "market" will naturally take care of it. You're looking at this through blurred glasses. People, not markets, will have a choice (if they so decide) to use or not use something. Buy or not buy something. That is their power and we have copious examples through out our history of this indeed working should enough people get together and want to make this change. Again, we are talking about a private company (Facebook) who relies on these very same people for it's success, this is NOT a reference to a form of government that is running out of control. We've seen FB change in the past (see my previous comment), no reason for them not to do the same in the future should WE decide they need to.

There is a huge difference.

I'm not. The boiling frog principle still applies. The revolutions you're talking about require people to get together and foment them, and I don't think it will happen at sufficient scale for FB to care, or to prevent them from having a very large negative effect on society.

It only hurts them in the long run if they're wrong about what people want. There have been many cases in the past where people raged against something new they didn't want, but the long term view demonstrated that they actually did want it. Potentially scary if this is one of those situations, of course. Certainly, people should have seen the writing on the wall long before this.

Are you new here? Facebook has "lied through its teeth" from day one and it's never hurt them.

I agree that Facebook's attained a position of power that lets it actively work towards making its long-term bet a reality. Good for them. I also hope to one day change the world in the direction I'd prefer it to go.

That said, there's no concrete evidence that Facebook is 'lying through its teeth'. If they are, the truth will come out - organizations of thousands can't hide bald-faced lies for long. But it would surprise me, because Facebook as an organization doesn't seem particularly stupid, and getting caught lying about cross-domain tracking (especially given our current activist FTC) would be really, really stupid.

bold face lies, i.e. "in print".

Moreover, if you've stumbled on something patentable that could potentially be useful to you (or any competitor) at any point in the future, of course you patent it.

To me this line of thinking lines up precisely with the notion of interest – they see it as something valuable for the future (and happen to be doing it now) – I'm not sure how all of that could lead to any conclusion other than Facebook having very real interest in tracking people.

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