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Comment by imiric | Hacker News Reader

Whatever Meta says publicly about this topic, and whatever its internal policies may be, directly contradicts its behavior. So any attempt to excuse this is nothing but virtue signalling and marketing.

The privacy violations and complete disregard for user data are too numerous to mention. There's a Wikipedia article that summarizes the ones we publicly know about.

Based on incentives alone, when the company's primary business model is exploiting user data, it's easy to see these events as simple side effects. When the CEO considers users of his products to be "dumb fucks", that culture can only permeate throughout the companies he runs.

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There’s a meaningful difference in a company wanting to exploit user data to enrich itself and allowing employees to engage in voyeurism. The latter doesn’t make the company money, and therefore can be penalised at no cost.

Your comment talks about incentives, but you haven’t actually made a rational argument tying actual incentives to behaviour.

My point is that it would be naive to believe that a company whose revenue depends on exploiting user data has internal measures in place to ensure the safe handling of that data. In fact, their actions over the years effectively prove that to not be the case.

So whatever they claim publicly, and probably to their low-level employees, is just marketing to cover their asses and minimize the impact to their bottom line.

What would be the cost of setting safeguards and firing employees that cross the line? Feel like an access control system would be fairly easy to build and firing employees is not a huge deal nowadays.

You claim it’s all talk, but it’s not much more effort to walk the walk. It doesn’t hurt profits to do it.

There is actually no difference, only a difference in intent.

The problem is similar to that of government efforts to ban encryption: if you have a backdoor, everyone has a backdoor.

If Meta is collecting huge amount of user info like candy (they are) and using it for business purposes (they are), then necessarily those employees implementing those business purposes can do that, too.

You can make them pinky promise not to. That doesn't do anything.

Meta has a similar problem with stalking via Ring camera. You allow and store live feeds of every Ring camera? News flash: your employees can, too! They're gonna use that to violate your customers!

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