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Comment by gundmc | Hacker News Reader

One of the authors of this paper works at Duck Duck Go. This was conspicuously not mentioned in the header information.

Anastasia Shuba, to save others the hassle of checking. https://nshuba.github.io/

I agree that it probably should be mentioned, but not enough to make me really doubt the rest of their paper.

Idk, I've recently gotten a popup shilling their version of chromium. I wouldn't be surprised if these are both a part of some PR campaign to push it.

When people here linked to the “pwease implement rcs so we can get adoption on our proprietary encryption extensions and become iMessage 2.0 but with google” page don’t you think maybe google might have had a PR campaign going on too?

Kinda odd this uniquely gets pointed out when it’s someone pushing back slightly on google, everyone is first in line to declare the player with 40% global market share anticompetitive and doesn’t even make a peep about google, even shouts down the attempts to bring the issue forward…

…tell me again why this isn’t just lawfare from android fanboys trying to get their choice of OS legislated?

People dumped on me when I said that knocking out safari would rapidly lead to a browser monoculture and anticompetitive usage of that from google. The excuse was “if that happens we’ll regulate that too”. Unsurprisingly, kinda seems like people don’t want that to actually happen now that it’s becoming an issue - you’re pushing back on it. See also: the "maybe a chrome monopoly is really better for consumers" downthread, gross.

Now, why is that, I wonder??? Maybe because it was just all an attempt to legislate a solution to google v apple after all?

Again: google and Tim Sweeney and netflix and facebook and Sony don’t care about you at all, and their goals don’t align with yours. The end state here isn’t user freedom, it’s iMessage with google banners instead. The hope was that you could hitch a ride on google’s PR effort until it was convenient and then discard them/override their wishes, instead it's the other way around.

This has always been a choice/anti-choice issue: for some people it's not enough that they personally can choose android, the option for walled-gardens needs to be removed entirely for everyone else too. And now you're seeing things move into the next phase, as they are discarded and google starts to flex the monopoly power that you lobbied to give them.

Like parent said, the motivations might not be 100% pure, but I doubt it invalidates the whole paper.

When competitors point out the flaws and scandals in each other they're often correct.

By that same logic, when competitors point out the superiority of their own product, are they also often correct?

Maybe we should just think critically about what we read, especially when there's a conflict of interest involved.

> when competitors point out the superiority of their own product, are they also often correct?

I would say they are in fact usually correct about the specific point they're making. However, it's also common for them to be drawing attention to the dimensions on which their product is better, which may not be the same as the dimensions that matter most to customers. They may be reporting selective truths and making correct-but-mostly-irrelevant points. This also goes for criticizing competitors, of course.

I cannot help but be reminded of the fact that DuckDuckGo also conspicuously does not mention that their founder has previously created a personal information gathering service and sold it, along with all of the personal information.

Twice is a coincidence; anyone have a third example?

were you expecting a bunch of people working at google to write this?

Just because someone works at a competitor doesn't invalidate their arguments.

I would imagine they can see these issues more first hand.

The actual journal that this was submitted to is Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law, Vol. 27. The linked article is a pre-print. Hardly surprising that the pre-print website did not contact every author of every article for their affiliation.

The affiliation not provided to SSRN looks ominous, but is just a standard form because she does not have ssrn profile. The other co-authors do have a profile. University academics are usually much better networked in Elseviers registers as both their institutions and themselves rely on it for carreer/evaluation purposes.

It depends on how the affiliation is stated in the next volume of VjET, if this is problematic or not.

The obligation to disclose potential conflicts (which is what this is, rather than merely 'affiliation') is on the researcher not the publisher or transmitter.

The website talks only about affiliation.

"Potential" is one of those funny words which can be stretched to mean anything. As such, its not worth arguing about. So your personal view of what is a potential conflict isn't something we can get into here. But what would be interesting is if you actually had evidence of bias in the article. That is definitely something we can discuss - regardless of who said it.

"Potential" is one of those funny words which can be stretched to mean anything.

There are common practices for that sort of thing and 'works for a competitor' falls well within them. The disclosure is so that readers can make their own assessment about whether the possible conflict has introduced actual bias. There really isn't anything complicated to discuss here.

>The disclosure is so that readers can make their own assessment about whether the possible conflict has introduced actual bias.

You are the reader here. Do you have any evidence of bias?

I'm saying the omission of the disclosure of an obvious conflict is a bad lapse. It's bad whether it results in bias or not and independent of what I think. The OG commenter was right to point it out and you're not right to suggest it only counts if there is evidence of bias.

For any journal, compliance is not the goal, the goal is the have high quality, impactful papers. If you care about compliance more than the paper, then sure, so be it, but its not a conversation I'm particularly interested in.

This isn't about 'compliance'. It's fine if you didn't know about the practice and its purpose but that's neither my fault nor a reason to misrepresent what wrote.

I don't agree with your opinion. Its no big deal, we can all happily co-exist! As a reader, you seem to care more about compliance than discussing the contents/quality of the paper. That tells me everything I need to know.

NB. Although the paper appears in "Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law", none of the authors are lawyers.

SSRN is pathetic as a source for papers, IMHO. Quality control is nonexistent. Even something simple like the URL for Shaoor Munir's website is incorrect. The "a href" is http://https//. This is a PhD candidate in Computer Science.

In the paper itself,1 Shuba is listed as "independent researcher". Her website states "independent researcher by night". It would not make sense to list DuckDuckGo as the affiliated organisation as she is doing the work on her own time. Arguably her website should be listed though, so readers can discover that she works there during the day.

Here is an example of SSRN's quality control:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4576722

The SSRN paper submission instructions appear to make it mandatory to submit an affiliation. The reality is that we could list our dogs as a co-authors and SSRN would accept the paper.

SSRN is just plain annoying. The website tries to force people into enabling Javascript just to download a PDF. That is totally unnecessary. Look at arxiv.org.

1. https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~zubair/files/jetlaw-chrome-antit... (No Javascript needed)

The pre-print now includes this information, and also that this work was carried out independently.

I wonder what other conflict of interest other authors have.

Ironically deceptive of her.

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