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Meh. Down vote me all you like but... I don't really understand the outrage. If you're not paying, you're the product. It's fairly obvious. All your data belong

Meh. Down vote me all you like but... I don't really understand the outrage. If you're not paying, you're the product. It's fairly obvious. All your data belong to them and they can basically do whatever they want with it because ToS, EULA, no data privacy laws, etc. This situation is their actual business model. The EU is making law like GDPR[0] to actually make this illegal but afaik there is no similar law in the States. What we need is something like GDPR or a HIPPA[1] equivalent for general personal data. One outcome here is the public outrage punishes FB market cap to the extent that FB self regulates and Congress takes action. The former is far more likely than the later nevertheless both will surely fail to adequately protect the public. A more advantageous outcome is better tech that provides FB like features in a decentralized fashion. Perhaps an OSS system that spins up encrypted vm's with FB/Twitter/Email like functionality all paid for via cryptocurrency is a future I would really like to see. I liked what Sandstorm was doing in this space[2]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Insurance_Portability_and_Accountability_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Insurance_Portability_a... [2] https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/

scotu 9y ago
I can explain you the outrage: nobody knows "if you are not paying you are the product" outside of your information bubble. We all make the mistake of thinking what we know should be common knowledge, but often it's not...
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
>I don't really understand the outrage. If you're not paying, you're the product. It's fairly obvious. All your data belong to them and they can basically do whatever they want with it because ToS, EULA, no data privacy laws, etc. This situation is their actual business model. The outrage about that is basically because people are angry they didn't read the fine print combined with anger over who the current US president is. Since a possile outcome of the angry people getting their way appears to be GDPR style regulation those of us who saw this coming from a mile away are going to fall somewhere on the spectrum of "doing nothing to calm the outrage" to "outright fanning the flames" Just because your customers signed a ToS or a EULA does not give you permission to act unethically. It just makes it harder for your customers to sue you when they figure it out.
downandout 9y ago
>Perhaps an OSS system that spins up encrypted vm's with FB/Twitter/Email like functionality all paid for via cryptocurrency is a future I would really like to see The problem is that very few people want to pay for this functionality, and even fewer actually care if a database somewhere has a record of them being one of 107 million people that clicked "like" on Coke's Facebook page. To be sure, there is a small but vocal contingent of people that do care (many of them on HN), and those people will delete their Facebook accounts and perhaps try to create decentralized solutions. But the #DeleteFacebook campaign mostly went nowhere, as did the campaign to get advertisers to drop Facebook. Those that do try to create new platforms as you suggest should be aware that they will not experience any significant uptake from Facebook users without improving on Facebook's core functionality. Enhanced privacy cannot be your primary selling point. For the most part, people don't spend $100K+ on a Tesla because it is an electric car - they spend it because Teslas are awesome cars with awesome features. You would need to build the Tesla of social networks to get anyone to switch.

scotu 9y ago

I can explain you the outrage: nobody knows "if you are not paying you are the product" outside of your information bubble. We all make the mistake of thinking what we know should be common knowledge, but often it's not...

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

>I don't really understand the outrage. If you're not paying, you're the product. It's fairly obvious. All your data belong to them and they can basically do whatever they want with it because ToS, EULA, no data privacy laws, etc. This situation is their actual business model. The outrage about that is basically because people are angry they didn't read the fine print combined with anger over who the current US president is. Since a possile outcome of the angry people getting their way appears to be GDPR style regulation those of us who saw this coming from a mile away are going to fall somewhere on the spectrum of "doing nothing to calm the outrage" to "outright fanning the flames" Just because your customers signed a ToS or a EULA does not give you permission to act unethically. It just makes it harder for your customers to sue you when they figure it out.

downandout 9y ago

>Perhaps an OSS system that spins up encrypted vm's with FB/Twitter/Email like functionality all paid for via cryptocurrency is a future I would really like to see The problem is that very few people want to pay for this functionality, and even fewer actually care if a database somewhere has a record of them being one of 107 million people that clicked "like" on Coke's Facebook page. To be sure, there is a small but vocal contingent of people that do care (many of them on HN), and those people will delete their Facebook accounts and perhaps try to create decentralized solutions. But the #DeleteFacebook campaign mostly went nowhere, as did the campaign to get advertisers to drop Facebook. Those that do try to create new platforms as you suggest should be aware that they will not experience any significant uptake from Facebook users without improving on Facebook's core functionality. Enhanced privacy cannot be your primary selling point. For the most part, people don't spend $100K+ on a Tesla because it is an electric car - they spend it because Teslas are awesome cars with awesome features. You would need to build the Tesla of social networks to get anyone to switch.