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Recently, there was an HN thread of a Chinese man who sold his kidney for an iPhone at 17 years of age and 8 years later was bedridden for life because his rema

• wbl 8y ago
  Most kidney failure causes will affect both kidneys.
  • FPGAhacker 8y ago
    The failure was brought on by the surgery itself.
  • jackvalentine 8y ago
    His was apparently caused by a lack of quality post-operative care.
• Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  You're implying (perhaps unintentionally) that selling an organ is equivalent to selling information on what websites you visit. There's a reason selling organs is illegal, at least in the US. I don't think personal information is so valuable that we need to outlaw its sale.
  • barrkel 8y ago
    Organ selling isn't illegal because organs are valuable.
    • grp000 8y ago
      Impingement on quality of life by the seller of an organ can be, and is translated to a value statement. However, the paradoxical nature of human beings which relies largely on emotional responses dictates that while we can have people starving in the streets, because it would make society squeamish, they can't be allowed to sell their organs, for the sake of their own human dignity and quality of life, never mind that society stripped them of both anyway.
      • Normal_gaussian 8y ago
        This isn't paradoxical at all, when both options are horrific there is little benefit to cover up one with the other and claim a solution. Furthermore a short term windfall from selling organs will not provide the skills or assets required to prevent long term starvation and homelessness; so now the horror has been compounded: homeless, starving, and prone to debilitating illness.
        • grp000 8y ago
          The paradoxical nature is that being homeless and starving is horrifying but something humans have become accustomed to, and yet the idea of selling organs is embedded culturally as being shocking, even if the end result of being starving and homeless is relatively equivalent to being desperate enough to sell organs, so it's not allowed. Also, how you mention as fact that money from selling organs won't prevent long term starvation and homelessness is surprising; you don't know that's the case one way or another but you're trying to pass off an opinion as fact. I can't argue either that it would help with a clear and definite metric, but the correlation of living conditions and money is clear. How real-life application of such legalization or organ selling, with quality of surgery and post-surgery care, legal predatory practices, and other factors are dealt with are potential problems, but those are issues that exist in all commercial domains. I also never argued organ selling as a solution to a problem; as others mentioned, it is a potential band-aid to a problem that lies in wealth inequalities, but which I find interesting as a societal flashpoint that show how knee-jerk emotional responses can cause logical paradoxes.
  • peteradio 8y ago
    Noone said they were equal, just that informed consent is important.
  • TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    I’m led to believe a whole bunch of intellectual heavy weights agree that privacy is so important it needs to be heavily regulated fairly immediately. I tend to agree with them. Come to think of it, is there anyone making a strong case for weaker privacy protection? I’m prepared to put aside my existing assumptions long enough to read an article or two.
  • pluma 8y ago
    > I don't think personal information is so valuable that we need to outlaw its sale. Europeans seem to disagree. Maybe your "reason" is just cultural bias?
    • dx034 8y ago
      GDPR doen't outlaw the sale of personal data. It just prohibits selling personal data without user consent. Under GDPR, it should be perfectly legal to compensate a user for agreeing to share personal data with marketing companies.
      • pluma 8y ago
        No, the point is that under GDPR you can't sell personal data because it remains the property of the person it was shared by. You can sell access to that data, but the purchaser inherits the terms under which that data was shared and can't use it for any purposes the owner did not already agree to -- plus that transfer itself has to be consensual. Also under GDPR the consent can be revoked at any point and the data has to be deleted. Plus the owner has to be given exhaustive information about what data was gathered, what basis it was gathered on and who it was passed on to (recursively).
  • jolmg 8y ago
    > equivalent to selling information on what websites you visit. You make it sound like they're just obtaining a list of URLs, but that's not it. For $20, they get to impersonate you while you're in the VPN and after you leave (they have all your passwords and session cookies). They can also impersonate anyone you deal with. They have all decrypted information going between you and the rest of the internet. Not even your ISP gets that amount. Even further problematic is the scale at which they can do this. This isn't just a concern we should see as individuals but also as a group. They can control a grand portion of information flow and authentication in the whole web.
• lawl 8y ago
  This is actually a great comparison, because I think both boil down to (a lack of?) informed consent. I think there's nothing inherently wrong with selling all your data for $20 a month. If you know exactly what you're doing. Very likely the kid didn't understand exactly all the risks and wasn't informed when selling his kidney. And I would guess it's the same thing for a lot of kids signing up for this facebook thingy thinking "free $20 a month? Let's fucking goooooooo!" But I honestly feel just as creeped out by apple dictating what people can install on their phones and what they can't.
  • shhehebehdh 8y ago
    See, I felt like it was not a great comparison because a body part is a very different thing from web traffic. Since Facebook does not stand to gain anything from inflicting material harm on you, the expected value of giving them your data is at worst very slightly negative. They’re likely not even recording most of it. (What would they do with it?) The same can emphatically not be said of a mission critical singly-redundant organ.
    • kkarakk 8y ago
      you may not feel immediate effects but at a societal scale it does come back to bite you
      • shhehebehdh 8y ago
        They can’t run this program on a societal level because it would cost too much (>100B a year in the US alone, which is surely more than the value they derive from it). So we really only need to be concerned about whether this hurts the individuals involved, and whether Facebook plans to do anything unethical with the data.
  • hackinthebochs 8y ago
    The danger is judging informed consent by what we would find acceptable. It's conceivable that one could understand the risks yet not appreciate the probability involved, or have a value system skewed towards present gratification. The point is that the concept of informed consent in cases like this don't really add much information.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• muthdra 8y ago
  By my calculations it was either an iPhone 4 or 4S.
• godelski 8y ago
  It comes down to informed consent. But that's a whole can of worms. One which needs to be opened and we need to sift through to find an acceptable answer. It is difficult to find something that allows freedom of choice and doesn't require a huge amount of knowledge. Plus, who decides what the facts are? The required minimum knowledge? How do you measure understanding? Are we going to have a ministry of truth? If so, who watches the watchmen?
• varrock 8y ago
  I got chills reading this. Great comparison.