2 ms·

It's trite, and aside from belonging in the big dustbin of Hacker News cliches like linking to XKCD Standards, 'Just because you can doesn't mean you should' an

It's trite, and aside from belonging in the big dustbin of Hacker News cliches like linking to XKCD Standards, 'Just because you can doesn't mean you should' and 'Conflating Causation and Correlation' in this case it obscures more than it illuminates. A product may be free - and you may still be happy to be the product if you think your attention is being sold, or that they plan to upsell you onto a premium plan. 'If you're not a paying user' doesn't immediately lead you to 'They're going to scan my email and sell the data to fucking Uber' and shouldn't require the user to scan the ToS / rack their brains for every nefarious bit of fuckery the company might conceivably use the data for.

gdulli 10y ago
How is it nefarious for Uber to use anonymized data to come to conclusions like: 1. Emails with subject [xxx] are opened more often than emails with subject [yyy]. 2. Lyft does more business in Scottsdale than we expected. 3. 25% of people who use ridesharing use multiple services and 75% are loyal to one service. 4. 33% of people who don't use ridesharing services also don't use traditional taxi services. "Nefarious" is a strong word.
CodeMage 10y ago
> 'If you're not a paying user' doesn't immediately lead you to 'They're going to scan my email and sell the data to fucking Uber' and shouldn't require the user to scan the ToS / rack their brains for every nefarious bit of fuckery the company might conceivably use the data for. I agree with the first half of what you said and disagree with the second. That's precisely the value of the original saying: it's not there to be an excuse for a company, it's there to spread awareness and remind people that they should get informed about just _how_ they're being productized _before_ they have cause to regret using the service. If more of us scanned the ToS carefully, we might catch the nefarious bits of fuckery on time and pressure the company to change. Does the privacy policy say your data will be sold to third parties? Great, find out what data, to what third parties and questions like that.

gdulli 10y ago

How is it nefarious for Uber to use anonymized data to come to conclusions like: 1. Emails with subject [xxx] are opened more often than emails with subject [yyy]. 2. Lyft does more business in Scottsdale than we expected. 3. 25% of people who use ridesharing use multiple services and 75% are loyal to one service. 4. 33% of people who don't use ridesharing services also don't use traditional taxi services. "Nefarious" is a strong word.

CodeMage 10y ago

> 'If you're not a paying user' doesn't immediately lead you to 'They're going to scan my email and sell the data to fucking Uber' and shouldn't require the user to scan the ToS / rack their brains for every nefarious bit of fuckery the company might conceivably use the data for. I agree with the first half of what you said and disagree with the second. That's precisely the value of the original saying: it's not there to be an excuse for a company, it's there to spread awareness and remind people that they should get informed about just _how_ they're being productized _before_ they have cause to regret using the service. If more of us scanned the ToS carefully, we might catch the nefarious bits of fuckery on time and pressure the company to change. Does the privacy policy say your data will be sold to third parties? Great, find out what data, to what third parties and questions like that.