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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

If you don't want to get sued, stick to the straight and narrow. Sell a product in exchange for money that does what you say it will do. Don't collect extensive user data, and protect what you do collect so it doesn't leak into the world. But if you make your money dabbling in legally and morally gray areas, then litigation is how you find out where the lines are drawn. There is frivolous litigation in this space--firms hoping for a quick $100k payout to just go away. But I don't think that's Edelson's business model.

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But there is no incentive to stay straight and narrow. The laws are weak, penalties are small, all your competitors are doing it (so it becomes a competitive advantage), users are either ignorant or don't care, most of the lawmakers have no clue about privacy...and so on.

What he is doing is a good first step, but the whole culture needs to change.

If users don't care why does culture need to change?

Users care, but the information asymmetry between seller and producer has never been as big as today. Most consumer do not know what they eat, what they buy, what agreement they sign, or what the things they interact daily with do.

That is a lot of unknowns, each demanding that the consumer is 100% aware or they are responsible for the result. This then leads to apathy, where we care and not care at the same time. A culture that makes people feel that they do not possess the level of skill required to confront daily life is a bad culture, creates depression, and is general bad for society at large.

I'll add that I'm among the elite in my ability to understand and manage my technology (I'm not boasting; almost everyone reading this is the same) and confidentiality is important to me.

But I don't have time to understand and manage the confidentiality of my IT; I have no hope. Even when I try to learn about one product's or service's confidentiality, the information available is often vague, incomplete and subject to change at any time (per their license agreements). I have so many products that I have no hope of keeping up.

And a 20 page small-type contract with dozens of companies. If you say you're getting informed consent from consumers you're a liar; there's no practical way to read and understand all the contracts (that can be updated at will) I have to agree to in order to use gmail, my isp, my cellphone, github, slack, zenefits, docusign, hellosign, groupon, my gym, my bank, my credit cards, direct deposit, yelp, google maps, android, paypal, ebay, hipchat, instacart, amazon, aws, backcountry, kingdom rush, uber, every single app on my phone, and I'm sure more that I can't list off the top of my head.

This is relevant here - http://www.geek.com/games/gamestation-eula-collects-7500-sou...

> If users don't care why does culture need to change?

Users clearly care. The market for privacy-oriented products (e.g., Snapchat), demand for privacy from existing products (recognized and responded to by Facebook and others), and the impact on reputation for companies who violate it (e.g., Uber) all have grown significantly. Surveys of the American public support these observations.

Because ethics aren't something you vote on.

The universe must bend to my desires?

That's basically human civilization in a nutshell.

Better mine than someone else's.

That is not how current VC funded mega viral startups operate. The outdated ideas of selling something usable for a price are so 1960s ... /s

That's only a way to avoid getting sued by privacy trolls. Other trolls will still find a way to sue you. Once you are majorly successful, you will get sued regularly. Period.

It's a general principle. If you're Apple and you generously replace every product that could have a design or manufacturing defect, you are unlikely to get sued on that basis. But when you're Apple and trying to figure out whether to replace expanding batteries or screens with messed up oleo phobic coating, you don't draw a line in the sand at a point where you won't get sued. You toe the line that balances replacement cost against brand impact and litigation risk.

Apple has a long history of settling class action lawsuits for defective products.

They'd rather defend a lawsuit and pay a settlement than preemptively replace all defective products as they come in. Companies make this sort of decision all the time--trading off users for the bottom line. There's nothing evil about it (no point in doing more than what the law requires of you), but if your policy is to do what you can get away with under the law, you should expect litigation over whether you've crossed the line in any given case.

There's nothing evil about it (no point in doing more than what the law requires of you)

I think reasonable people could debate both of those points. Making either ethical judgements or PR/branding decisions based only on the minimal standards required of you by law is always a dangerous path to tread.

This is only partly for the reason you give, that some people will sue you now. It's also partly because of the other consequences. Some people may sue you later and with more success, possibly after the rules of the game have been changed by subsequent legislation or precedents. Worse, some people may not bother suing you at all and may simply vote with their wallet and/or encourage others to do so, and that is an attack against which a business is given little opportunity to defend itself.

That's fine but it's the opposite of what you said first.

Sorry, my first sentence was ambiguous. I meant if you were in charge of Apple and had a hypothetical policy of generous replacements.

Do this and someone with a different set of tastes for the "straight and narrow" will attack you for commodifying things, or beating up on the less privileged by charging for stuff that ought to be free, or for having lousy products because you don't know about your users.

If by 'attack' you mean 'say mean things' - then sure.

I mean, you're absolutely right about how business people seem to really really hate people who make commodities, even though it's in the buyer's interest to buy things that are sold as commodities (e.g. goods and/or services where switching vendors is easy)

It's a lot like how business people get all hostile when you talk about competing on price. "It's not about the money!" they shout, like overdressed, aging hippies. But it's a transparent lie, and I think largely harmless.

but... yeah, as far as I can tell, the hostility starts and ends at saying mean things (and, you know, not giving you money, but I don't really live in the universe where investors give you money, so likely that is observer bias.)

I think it's just the general kind of hostility you get from co-workers, in most industries when you make them look bad by working harder than they do.

Tell that to everyone who's been wrongfully sued. There's no connection between "the straight and narrow" and the law industry. When you have rooms of people brainstorming who to sue next for the most money, sanctimony isn't merited.

I'm not trying to be pedantic, but there is a connection between the straight and narrow (i.e., the law) and the law industry. Netflix, for example, committed a legal error, and they paid for it. This is essentially private enforcement of the law. Whether the law is sensible is another discussion.

Works for Apple.

Works for the 10 largest software companies, most of which sell to businesses.

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