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Comment by nyokodo | Hacker News Reader

> I’ve stopped being an unpaid worker for the mega corps… I try to use OpenStreetMap consistently and provide as much data as I can

That’s a good thing and I like your framing. By contrast, the article frames this as you being tricked into it by the commercial companies to which you previously directly provided data but that’s just nonsense. You weren’t tricked, and you aren’t a victim. I’m glad OpenStreetMap is there to provide the same value with open data but the closed systems still provided value and did not coerce or trick anyone.

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> but the closed systems still provided value and did not coerce or trick anyone.

I disagree. Google et al very much trick people into thinking they are helping "the community" by contributing to their databases. They even tell people how "popular" they are because their reviews were included in searches. Do you think as many people would contribute if they were honest about it and said "help make our ads more valuable"?

It's possible to be popular and also profited from at the same time.

That's manipulative but not really deceptive.

> trick people into thinking they are helping "the community" by contributing to their databases

The only way that would be a trick is if they were helping the app owner while not making the app more valuable to the community which is obviously not the case. Clearly the voluntary contributors are adding value to the app and are therefore helping the community who uses the app.

> Do you think as many people would contribute if they were honest about it and said "help make our ads more valuable"

Their business models have been public this whole time, hence our discussion, none of this has been a secret. The mere fact that companies tend to paint everything about their operations in the best light possible instead of the opposite is not evidence of trickery or even morally culpable deception.

> The mere fact that companies tend to paint everything about their operations in the best light possible instead of the opposite is not evidence of trickery or even morally culpable deception.

We definitely differ in opinion there. I don't know why people think companies can get away with things that humans never would.

I just don't get the mindset of 'companies are evil, it's how it has to be'. Because it doesn't.

They did trick us a bit in my opinion. The pervasiveness of their tracking networks was never made clear.

That part was a trick. Was... at this point, people assume even worse things but by-and-large don't seem to care.

But the above comment was about user-submitted feedback used for improving Google Maps, which doesn't seem like a trick at all.

They didn't need to trick anyone. They withheld knowledge.

Every tech company agreed they could do whatever they wanted with user created data and the user had no rights over that data.

No user was informed of the full extent of the consequences of agreeing to use new tech... or allowed to alter the 'agreement' tech companies offered the user.

The 'trick' was hiding sales tactics that were illegal in traditional businesses, behind TOS, EULAs and unregulated internet space.

We all know deep down inside that no man would agree to what big tech did, so the deal was made unintelligble to the user.

They didn't trick you anymore than Facebook didn't trick people into being a free social media service. People elect to post data and never took away explicit permissions to use that data in other ways. FB isn't the government so 4th amendment rights would not apply.

But that's an edge case tbh. Hearing of scrapers ignoring Robots.txt and going after copyright show that they couldn't care less about ethical scraping. They more than overstepped their bounds in some places.

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