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Comment by taurath | Hacker News Reader

Too many people making too much money - to be honest, people really should blame tech for it, all it takes is RSUs to look the other way. Morally most of the US is running far away from tech and the surveillance state but here it’s still okay to work for monsters and self justify building population control systems and ad networks (often one and the same)

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The solution is always to constrain every level of government with more aggressive privacy laws. As long as they are allowed to do it then some private contractors will take the money to help make it ... or government will make their own in house tech teams. Relying on the morals of the general public to limit state surveillance is not a good strategy, but it is of course good when companies take a stand and the tech community creates tools to push back.

It should be prohibited outright. If you allow a loophole for corporations then they will just sell it as a service and we will never be free of it.

Companies create the environment - the government is supposed to be “small” - and it must remain small so the US “consumer” can be leeched from

The US government is very far from small. That said, I'd be open to rules on the data broker industry though considering it's scale and how the foreign governments can buy/hack them bypassing all of Tiktok-esque national security handwaving.

> Tiktok-esque national security handwaving.

Algorithmic feeds are propaganda tools. A foreign government being able to propagandize your citizens is a legitimate threat, not handwaving.

Think for a nanosecond about how exploitable that is. Imagine for a moment that a foreign nation had obtained proof that say ICE was engaged in sex trafficking and publishing it only for it to be blocked as 'destabilizing propaganda'.

If anybody says that propaganda is a valid reason for censorship I say, censor thyself first.

No one said anything about censorship. There are many things that would pose a threat if controlled by a foreign adversary. Communications platforms with algorithmic feeds are one of them.

"morals of the general public" helps lead to "more aggressive privacy laws"

By RSU, I'm assuming you mean this:

> Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) are a form of equity compensation where employers promise company shares, typically vesting over time, offering a way to align employee interests with company performance

Yes - you buy the house in the bay, and companies will lock you in with the vesting schedule. Just another 3, 4 years and you’ll be rich enough to afford a second one, or retire early. Some people can self justify what they do, or pretend because they work in a “nicer” part of a company than the core revenue part that it’s all okay that what pays their checks is mass behavior manipulation. I don’t like ads or social coercion, at all.

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