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I am reminded of Thoreau's quote: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." The root of the problem is not tha

• TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Strongly agreed. I didn't want to post yet another "reason #651235 why I loathe adtech" comment, but that's really it. Bots pretending to be people wouldn't be of interest at this level if it was just criminals trying to scam people - it would be just another type of crime. This is a problem because of the almost-fraud tactics of sales and marketing that, for some reason, happen to be on the right side of the legal line. I suggest we move that line to solve this problem.
  • crankylinuxuser 7y ago
    Ad: It does EVERYTHING!!!! 2pt font on page 14: Except this page of exclusions, and conflicting exclusions, and the fact the company can add any of their choosing at any time without notice.
    • athenot 7y ago
      Many ads have in tiny print "for illustration purposes only, do not attempt", ie. when showcasing some fantasy use-case of the product. That copy should really be "for deception purposes only".
  • Will_Parker 7y ago
    > Bots pretending to be people wouldn't be of interest at this level if it was just criminals trying to scam people How about foreign agents trying to influence elections at scale, or inciting civil unrest?
    • jeffdavis 7y ago
      How do you enforce the law against foreign agents?
      • Will_Parker 7y ago
        Create some accountability to those who allow it?
        • Gibbon1 7y ago
          AKA: If you pay a foreign agency to run a social media bot campaign go to prison. And get sued by the social media company.
• murat124 7y ago
  Not disagreeing with you but I believe Thoreau said that about philanthropy. > There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.
  • perfmode 7y ago
    imho, this strengthens the OP’s use of the quote. successful Tech founders are especially guilty of producing what they strive in vain to relieve.
    • ticmasta 7y ago
      perhaps, but I think Thoreau is talking primarily about the risk of producing a systemic dependency, i.e. the "teach a man to fish" philosophy. He was an ardent believer in self-sufficiency and prioritized individual autonomy over maximizing group benefit. He has a lot of great things to say but you could argue their relevancy and context is often misrepresented.
      • Can_Not 7y ago
        Our current problem is the growth of "make sure all ways a man can fish has to pay rent to me first".
• hajhatten 7y ago
  > see the Samsung ad which they're currently being hauled over the coals for in Australia. For people not in the know, apparently Samsung is marketing its latest phones as water proof with ads showing surfers and people fully clothed under water. ACCC does not approve of this, as the phones aren't IP rated for use in salt water. https://www.techradar.com/news/samsung-is-getting-sued-in-australia-for-misleading-galaxy-phone-ads https://www.techradar.com/news/samsung-is-getting-sued-in-au...
  • wccrawford 7y ago
    And if the article I read is true, they aren't honoring the warranty in the case of water damage.
    • dannyw 7y ago
      Correct, my phone died after briefly exposing it to salt weather on a beach. I was misled by the ads I saw, there was no implication except in very fine print that saltwater will immediately fry your phone.
      • TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Well, frankly, fuck them. Last year on vacation I was this close to taking my phone to the sea with me, because obviously it's "waterproof" (as their marketing copy tells me). Only my wife reminded me that just because they say it is, doesn't mean it actually is, and especially doesn't mean I should risk my expensive phone to test that theory on vacation.
        • 420codebro 7y ago
          Your wife is a saint. Just imagine how fucking pissed you would of been...
  • novok 7y ago
    Samsung isn’t the only one. Apple is similar too in its carve outs for water damage in it’s warranty. Im guessing samsung weasels out of it by saying water ‘resistance’ vs proof, but still marketing it with surfers and such? My water resistant series 3 apple watch screen died after swimming in a pool the next day to give a personal example.
• mprev 7y ago
  Not disagreeing but at least the Australian ad authority is actually dealing with the Samsung case.
  • sundvor 7y ago
    Basically they've warrantied their phones for chlorine or salt water immersion now here in Australia. They won't be refusing warranty claims for related damage. Minor PSA: If you ever immerse your IP68 rated device in anything other than water, make sure to give it a rinse in water ASAP. Preferably not too high pressure water either.
• kodz4 7y ago
  Some part of the population is always going to use deception and weakness of others. I don't think there is a "general fix". You just have to constantly show them where the boundaries are and the cost of crossing them. Taking advantage of the expectation, that a general fix is possible, is what gets Charlatans and Panderers into power. That said, despite the fact that it has been easier to take advantage of the weaknesses in the population faster and at scales never before, (imagine a shark, overnight, growing more efficient at hunting/doubling its kill count and hunting grounds, and that trait spreading to all sharks by the next day) that same pace causes natural born predators to bump into each other more, clashing more frequently, expending more resources/energy in empire defense. There is no free lunch, even to the mindlessly ambitious douchebags of society. They put up an appearance that there is.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > that same pace causes natural born predators to bump into each other more, clashing more frequently, expending more resources/energy in empire defense. And that's a problem in this case, because it's not like any of the predators in ad industry actually dies. They just deliver less money for the parties that employed/contracted them. Advertising has a different dynamic than regular predation, because in a saturated market, effort of any party serves only to cancel out the efforts of every other party. It's a zero-sum game that can consume near-infinite amount of energy and resources. Now think of all the man hours, electricity, fossil fuels, papers, paints, toxic chemicals and human dignity - all wasted in a zero sum game - and tell me again that advertisers "expending more resources/energy in empire defense" is a good thing. It's the opposite - it'll eat our economy and kill us through side effects of all the resource wastage.
    • pixl97 7y ago
      >And that's a problem in this case, because it's not like any of the predators in ad industry actually dies. Hmm, I'm not saying that you unintentionally found a solution here.
• zapita 7y ago
  Great. What do you propose?
• dalbasal 7y ago
  The "root" of the problem is a tricky metaphor. It can be defined different ways, and the most abstract (ie, You can't swing at it) is often what people come up with. How would you fix, at a general level, the overall human & corporate tendency to play loose with the truth? I mean, we're subtly dishonest all the time.
  • ethbro 7y ago
    Implement a tax on advertising budgets and use it to fund an independent watchdog, a la CFPB. To avoid capture, require all watchdog individuals to be masked / anonymized, with prosecution flowing through the DoJ.
• acdha 7y ago
  I agree that this is a widespread problem in many areas but I do think there’s a strong argument that bots are worth singling out in the context of social networking, where the bots are often used to steer public opinion in non-obvious ways with no clear ownership. It’s one thing if Samsung’s support chat-bot is misleading but that at least is obviously linked to the company in question whereas, say, the fake Twitter accounts complaining about Nike using photo stolen from real people aren’t easily associated with whoever is pushing that campaign and the intention is clearly to shift public opinion. There are good arguments for preserving anonymity but banning misrepresentation seems more defensible. (I mentioned the Nike thing not because this is limited to conservatives but because that was the most recent example which came to mind: there were a bunch of well-promoted tweets from accounts using profile pictures of attractive young women which a quick tineye search showed were long-running Instagram users under different names)
  • ethbro 7y ago
    The other issue with bots is whether a company's support is bot-only or human. Free choice and all, but without disclosure (pre-purchase) a company shouldn't be able to "cost manage" their support function by using an algorithm fronted by chatbots.
    • sokoloff 7y ago
      Should they have to disclose that their phone system has an IVR before every purchase as well? That they use a third-party logistics provider to handle returns?
      • ethbro 7y ago
        Utilizing algorithmic-only customer support seems far more impactful than those technologies, from a customer standpoint. As Google and PayPal have shown, it's generally a cluster$&#* (at best), even with state of the art technologies. Furthermore, it provides a fundamental shift in the power dynamic by removing the possibility of whistleblowers and ethical counterpressure. You literally have management as the sole arbiter of algorithmic settings, with (currently) no legal disclosure requirements as to any internals. That seems pretty screwed up from a free-market, transparency perspective.
• brownbat 7y ago
  > allow call-center employees in third-world countries to pretend I agree companies should be forced to tell the truth to their customers, but in all cases where they're asking for details about the customer service rep? That could go weird places. If a caller demanded to know the rep's HIV status, we wouldn't insist the company disclose it. We'd probably demand they didn't. Honesty is important, ok, but the customer has no reasonable need to know that. So, ok, it's not as simple as "tell the customer everything." There are some judgment calls the company has to make about what's important to disclose and what is irrelevant. The service rep's race, religion, medical history, or sexual orientation are probably not up for discussion. Why not national origin? This isn't just about fairness to the rep, but the majority of customers need the company to hold this line too. If some portion of the population strongly believes that foreign call centers are lower quality, are you going to get the best possible answers on a survey if you say, "this was a foreign call center, how was the quality?" Disclosing irrelevant details can sabotage collection of unbiased information on call quality. If customers as a whole want improved service quality, they'll want the company to be able to collect unbiased post-call survey results. If call centers in country X are all terrible, unbiased surveys will reveal that. If it's really about training, and there are good and bad call centers in several different countries, unbiased surveys will reveal that too. I know passions run deep on this one, and it's a hard case, but this one seems a little more complicated than the others.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • jimhefferon 7y ago
    > If a caller demanded to know the rep's HIV status This seems very far from the OP's thesis that in our culture there is a normalization of lying by people trying to sell us things.
  • pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    I think it's more "Hello, it's [fake name they can't quite pronounce chosen to be a common UK name] calling you from [company they don't work for but who ordered a phone advertising service], it's lovely weather here in [small UK town they mispronounced badly and where it's terrible weather today], how are you today? ... Great, we are calling about your [account with company you don't have an account with] ..." It's basically all lies, and all unnecessary, trying to win some trust as part of a marketing exercise. Bleurgh.
• quotemstr 7y ago
  You're absolutely right about normalizing lies and deception. You know what normalizes lying faster than anything else? Requiring that people lie about the evidence of their own eyes if they're to be accepted into polite company. We've built a society in which lying is compulsory in certain domains. Why on Earth would anyone expect the lying to stay within those domains once the taboo against dishonesty in general is broken?
• r00fus 7y ago
  In the US, at the core of that problem is the deception that corporations are "people" at a fundamental level. That fundamental untruth allows and essentially permits all the others. Bots? Just a manifestation of the above.
  • daveFNbuck 7y ago
    I'm having trouble seeing the connection between these two issues. If we didn't treat corporations as people, how would that stop companies from using bots?
    • svachalek 7y ago
      Citizens have a right to free speech. Corporations do not, unless they also happen to be people.
      • jdsully 7y ago
        Do groups of people have a right to free speech or just individuals acting alone?
        • etripe 7y ago
          The group as an aggregate has the right to free speech because each individual does and they share the right to assembly. There is no good reason to afford the group a new collective identity with its own rights other than allowing people to hide behind the group identity and avoid personal persecution. That's a risky proposition and should be curtailed or at least conditional. Should the Catholic church be able to hide behind its fictional collective identity to shield priests from abuse charges? Should execs be able to blame "corporate strategy" to avoid persecution as if they had no contribution? If so, to what degree does that still warrant large wages? Should diplomats be able to run down people in the street without penalty, run red lights or import contraband? Can ads lie about product specifications, safety, ingredients, or the value proposition? As with programming questions: it depends. I would argue the answer is definitely not always and without conditions.
• adamsea 7y ago
  True. I would like to add, however, that just because they're not striking at the root doesn't mean they should stop hacking at the branch. It's still an evil branch, to use Thoreau's metaphor.
• isoskeles 7y ago
  We also “allow” the government to use deception. This entire thread appears to be focused on mostly inconsequential annoyances like adtech as if this is somehow the worst thing in the world, and the only savior can be the state finding the “root” to regulate and fix as if that wouldn’t include fixing itself somehow.
• SmirkingRevenge 7y ago
  The problem with norms: bad actors don't care about them. Norms and regulation/law can work together. Either alone are insufficient, I think. Strong international norms and regulations are probably needed as well. As we clean up our domestic affairs, we create more space for hostile state actors to fill.
  • jdironman 7y ago
    It seems then, that it starts with the infrastructure / process. If the infrastructure supports abuse freely, it will be abused. There will always those who try to find a way regardless..
  • ticmasta 7y ago
    >> The problem with norms: bad actors don't care about them. This is a very important observation. The world most of us want is one influenced by norms we work together to define & change over time. Some see this as an opportunity to exploit for personal gain and we eventually get imperfect regulation that tries to reflect what we originally intended, or worse, is enacted by the same bad actors to coerce the bad behaviours we resisted in the first place. I see this all the time in growing companies: 1. culture dictates expected behaviour 2. company grows 3. culture weakens 4. norms get violated (intentionally or not) 5. process gets decreed to address transgressions 6. everyone looses the shared benefit/responsibility of autonomy 7. GOTO 1
• anon1m0us 7y ago
  The real problem then, is that corporations have unchecked power. No one acting behind them is personally liable for their illegal behavior. Corporations can't go to jail. They only pay fines that are a fraction of their profits from the illegal behavior, which is a mathematical incentive for them to break the law before their competitors. Even in silicon valley, we laud AirBNB, Uber, Facebook, Google, et al. Do you want corporations to be better or not care?
  • angel_j 7y ago
    How hard would it be to write laws that punish companies in ways that will shape their behavior, like we do with people? All you have to do is take away their ability to business in your jurisdiction. That's corporate jail.
  • ETHisso2017 7y ago
    Corporations can, however, have sanctions imposed on them, like Huawei or ZTE. Perhaps we ought to explore placing companies that routinely lie to consumers on the BIS Entity List, and bar other American companies from doing business with them until they change their ways.
  • hedora 7y ago
    I’m a fan of forcing corporations to issue shares to the victims. Do something minor? 10% dilution. Do something worthy of the corporate death penalty? Issue 100 shares for every share outstanding. Of course, the issued shares would have as many votes as the maximum currently issued share (so if the founders get 10 votes per share that is what the victims get too). Note that you can set precedents based on percentage ownership, so this naturally scales to large (and small) companies. If this were common practice, I guarantee you that companies would be a lot more careful to obey the law: The ceo, founders, and investors all would have a bigger personal financial incentive to obey the law than to break it.
    • dredmorbius 7y ago
      Fascinating suggestion. I'm trying to think of consequences. Among those: if lawyers get 30% of settlements, then large consumer-rights law firms could end up as major shareholders. That could get v. interesting several ways.
• calibas 7y ago
  I agree, and I believe things like massive boycotts, worker-owned cooperatives, and stronger unions are the answer, along with an independent news media. I know the normal reaction is more fines and regulation, but then you're using bureaucracy and court cases to fight people who are masters of bureaucracy and court cases.
• jancsika 7y ago
  How do you propose to fix dishonesty on the general level?
• friendlybus 7y ago
  The root problem is the identity problem on the internet. Having anon accounts is good for HN but as soon as money is involved we need a structure that solves the identity for all people inside the transaction. Technology has to become 1984 levels to ID users at all times. Better to have an identity relationship with a structure or body that you can meet with in real life, like a bank. A mix of tech and human relations is required for a sane identity relationship with this governing body and therefore everybody you do business with on the net. Lying goes back to manageable levels once the identity is linked to someone's real life reputation.
• atoav 7y ago
  Advertisment is the root of many today’s time. Marketers could argue that it is just about helping people to find the right product or service, but this is another lie. Maybe a lie you have tell yourself if you are working in that field.
• grawprog 7y ago
  >allow call-center employees in third-world countries to pretend (even sometimes though elaborate lying) that they are located in the same country as you. I have a friend who worked at a call centre located in asia for an American company. They were threatened with termination if customers heard them speaking in their native language and the training for the job consisted mostly of faking an American way of speaking as much as possible.
• simonebrunozzi 7y ago
  Maybe a form of public shaming and accountability could help? This is a minuscule experiment I am running: https://gitlab.com/simonebrunozzi/dark-companies https://gitlab.com/simonebrunozzi/dark-companies