Comment by zaptrem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zaptrem | Hacker News Reader

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> Betterment of humanity? Blink twice if a LinkedIn PR person is holding you at gunpoint

I was referring to Generative AI in general, this use-case is quite boring.

> a corporate behemoth vacuuming people's personal information so they can sell them to the highest bidder

Do people not use LinkedIn to explicitly signal to the world that they're looking for a job? Why does it matter how that information is being delivered? If you don't want the world to know you're looking for a job simply don't update LinkedIn?

> corporate use of technology for mass surveillance is equally incompatible with the idea of a democratic society

The argument against government power/surveillance is that they have a monopoly on it and may use their power to hurt people. It is good to legally protect sensitive information like health data from advertisers, but in this case you can, again, simply not use LinkedIn. What difference does it make if the info is collected by a company looking for new hires, a third party analytics company working on behalf of them, or LinkedIn itself working on behalf of them? It's not private data.

"just dont use LinkedIn" is such a narrow minded thing to say. How do you feasibly expect people to exist in society without interacting with any of these systems and corporations? if its not LinkedIn its Indeed or w/e else. They all collect data and most of them are pumping it into some kind of LLM or behavioral analysis algo. That is not functionally different than the argument for the Government doing it, except for that the Gov has a monopoly on violence.

This applies for pretty much everything in our daily life like banking, shopping etc... "just don't interact" is such a useless nothing-burger that side-steps the problem entirely. You can "solve" all societal problems by becoming a hermit, moving to the woods and living off the land... but that is not a functional or reasonable thing to do for 99.99% of people. Its baffling especially when the reasonable solution is simply having a bare minimum standards of protection across the board, which many countries already implement to great effect.

I’ve never gotten a job via LinkedIn, and neither has my wife. We both got our entire job history due to connections already formed through college. In fact I can’t name a single genuine offer that came from LinkedIn/Indeed, let alone that depended on me having an account. People have been getting great paying jobs for almost the entirety of industrialized society without LinkedIn. Saying “don’t interact” with LinkedIn, especially if you disagree with their “you are the product” mentality, is a fairly realistic stance.

> ... surveillance is that they have a monopoly on it

Wait what, this isn't even close to being true

> government power ... is that they have a monopoly on it

This is only true by definition. McDonalds also has a monopoly on serving McDonalds food.

> use their power to hurt people

This is universally true of anyone with power. The difference between the government and other powerful organizations is that the government has a universal feedback mechanism via voting. In a democracy everyone gets a say in the laws that affect them.

I don't have to use LinkedIn and they can't throw me in jail or worse. Most people have no choice but to use their government (yeah I guess I could move but most cannot and it assumes there's another country that would take you).

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