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As much as I dislike facebook, a lot of these articles these days just seem like "piling on" (albeit deserved) and quite frankly unsurprising to most people _he

As much as I dislike facebook, a lot of these articles these days just seem like "piling on" (albeit deserved) and quite frankly unsurprising to most people _here on HN_.

netsharc 9y ago
Earlier I realized, the lesson to be learned is, if you have an online platform, you should care about users' privacy even if you're small, because who knows, one day it can lead to an international scandal with you as the bad guy.
- black_puppydog 9y ago
  So I guess at least someone here learned something from all this. :)
lambda_lover 9y ago
We see most of these articles because we're in tech. The average user probably will see only a fraction of them, so it's not so much "piling on" as trying to reach as many people as possible. It definitely seems like there's a media circus about Facebook right now, but that's mostly because for the first time, journalists are realizing there's a large audience for negative articles about Facebook. So this is probably months or years of articles that didn't get sign-off that are finally getting the green light by editors because there's actually a clear audience now (and maybe the media was afraid to step on Facebook's toes before?).
- black_puppydog 9y ago
  Hmmmm... maybe I'm underestimating the number of non- and semi-technical people following HN. I do see the current debate in the general public as (at least potentially) healthy and long overdue, I just felt that here on HN this wouldn't really pass as "news" in the literal sense, and that by now everyone here would have gotten the meta-story that "the normies" are waking up to the reality of surveillance capitalist business models...
  - lambda_lover 9y ago
    Even as somebody who works in tech, this article revealed something shockingly scummy about Facebook. The general news of "Facebook harvests your data!" is definitely well-known in tech, but I'd say that this story qualifies as a genuine scoop.

As much as I dislike facebook, a lot of these articles these days just seem like "piling on" (albeit deserved) and quite frankly unsurprising to most people _here on HN_.

netsharc 9y ago

Earlier I realized, the lesson to be learned is, if you have an online platform, you should care about users' privacy even if you're small, because who knows, one day it can lead to an international scandal with you as the bad guy.

black_puppydog 9y ago
So I guess at least someone here learned something from all this. :)

lambda_lover 9y ago

We see most of these articles because we're in tech. The average user probably will see only a fraction of them, so it's not so much "piling on" as trying to reach as many people as possible. It definitely seems like there's a media circus about Facebook right now, but that's mostly because for the first time, journalists are realizing there's a large audience for negative articles about Facebook. So this is probably months or years of articles that didn't get sign-off that are finally getting the green light by editors because there's actually a clear audience now (and maybe the media was afraid to step on Facebook's toes before?).

black_puppydog 9y ago
Hmmmm... maybe I'm underestimating the number of non- and semi-technical people following HN. I do see the current debate in the general public as (at least potentially) healthy and long overdue, I just felt that here on HN this wouldn't really pass as "news" in the literal sense, and that by now everyone here would have gotten the meta-story that "the normies" are waking up to the reality of surveillance capitalist business models...
- lambda_lover 9y ago
  Even as somebody who works in tech, this article revealed something shockingly scummy about Facebook. The general news of "Facebook harvests your data!" is definitely well-known in tech, but I'd say that this story qualifies as a genuine scoop.