4 ms·

Insert comment about how asbestos removal only fucked over consumer choice. If you cant meet basics of compliance, dont be surprised that your website that is

• logicchains 7y ago
  Asbestos apparently kills 255,000 people annually (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5982039/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5982039/). How many people has Facebook killed? "Asbestos killed millions of people, and I don't like Facebook, so we should treat Facebook the same as asbestos" is not a valid argument.
  • hobs 7y ago
    Nobody made the claim we should treat fb the same as asbestos - I didn't say we should ban using it from all places, or that it causes cancer or w/e. If your business has something that causes externalities and you dont pay for them, the government is going to(hopefully!) regulate you from screwing the rest of us over, or selling dangerous products to consumers for cheaper because of "choice". If you claim that choice is impacted and that's a bad thing you actually need to prove the counter claim - that the activity you are doing is SO IMPORTANT to us as a society its worth going around our standard operating procedures.
    • logicchains 7y ago
      >If you claim that choice is impacted and that's a bad thing you actually need to prove the counter claim - that the activity you are doing is SO IMPORTANT to us as a society its worth going around our standard operating procedures. To me that sounds like a nightmarish world to live in, one in which you have no rights except what others choose to grant you. What about the principle of innocent until proven guilty? The burden of proof should be on the accusers claiming harm, otherwise we might as well just completely stop advancing as a species, because anything we change could possibly harm someone in some unspecified way.
      • dmitriid 7y ago
        > What about the principle of innocent until proven guilty? Doesn't apply to Facebook. They've repeatedly shown themselves to be guilty.
        • logicchains 7y ago
          People here keep claiming that but I haven't seen any examples presented that actually try to quantify whatever harm it is they've caused.
          • dmitriid 7y ago
            They've repeatedly mishandled and mismanaged users' private data. No, it's not benign even if "no one died".
            • logicchains 7y ago
              So have many other companies, and even some governments have leaked citizen data. Do you really think the other dating sites currently working Europe have better OpSec or gather significantly less data than Facebook?
              • sgift 7y ago
                The data protection agencies will come around to them at some point. It's not like they stop with Facebook Dating and don't check anyone else in the future.
                • logicchains 7y ago
                  That's not it looks like from outside Europe; from the enforcement so far it just looks like they have a beef with US tech companies.
                  • dmitriid 7y ago
  • dmitriid 7y ago
    "Just because some other thing is so much worse we should ignore the bad thing". Got it.
    • logicchains 7y ago
      No, "we should ban X because we ban Y and Y is bad" is not a reasonable argument because "bad" is a matter of degree. That argument only works if we can show X is as bad as y.
      • dmitriid 7y ago
        No. "We should ban X because we know that X is bad and we have a long standing tradition of banning bad things. See Y, Z, etc. for examples of other bad things that were eventually banned."
        • logicchains 7y ago
          But the "bad" in that case is meaningless then if the harm from Y and Z is orders of magnitude greater than any harm that's been demonstrated from X.
          • dmitriid 7y ago
            "We shouldn't prosecute thieves. The harm is meaningless compared to genocide".
            • logicchains 7y ago
              More like "We shouldn't jail jaywalkers, the harm is meaningless compared to thieves".
              • dmitriid 7y ago
                It really isn't. Data protection laws have been in place in Europe for way longer than GDPR. They all basically say this: you must protect private and personally identifiable data of people. Nearly every single tech company did nothing to protect that data. Especially the international behemoths like Facebook. Then the EU unified the different data protection laws into a single one: GDPR. And said: up until now we were lax in protecting out citizens' rights. We're gonna stop doing that now. logicchains on HN: oh my god, how can you even think of enforcing this against a poor company who offers users choice. The same company that sells private data wholesale, tracks users even if they are not present on the site, regularly breaches privacy laws, explicitly targeted teenagers for behavioural research, prevents users from permanently removing records from the service, retains data on a people even after removal from service, exposes private and sensitive data to thousands of advertisers, tracks users' locations despite opt-out, aggregates users' health data without their consent, lobbies against privacy protections, etc. etc. etc. Yes. That's exactly why GDPR exists and exactly why FB must comply with it.