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Tech companies, or any company for that matter, will do what is best for themselves. Regulations exist to protect consumers and other companies from accusative
by Hokusai 6y ago
Tech companies, or any company for that matter, will do what is best for themselves.
Regulations exist to protect consumers and other companies from accusative behaviors. Remove the regulation and the 'we care for your privacy' message disappears with it. Because they never cared for your privacy, they will just doing what was mandatory.
- chrisseaton 6y ago> Regulations exist to protect consumers and other companies from accusative behaviors. I think this is possibly a bit naive. Regulations also exist to protect powerful people's businesses, to push personal agendas, and to further political aims even if those are not actually in the interests of any consumers. Also sometimes people think they're making a regulation to protect consumers, but actually it makes things worse.
- dkdk8283 6y agoRegulations are fluid and often end up raising the barrier to entry often stifling the competition.
- amaccuish 6y agoCompanies are often fluid, especially smaller ones, and can more easily adapt to a changing world.
- dcolkitt 6y agoThis just isn’t consistent with the empirical evidence whatsoever. An overwhelming amount of economic analysis shows that the burden of regulation disproportionately falls on small business. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t other justifications for any given regulation. But ain’t no small business owner or entrepreneur in history ever said “Boy! All these regulations sure are making my life easy”
- tstrimple 6y agoYeah, we never see examples of small teams disrupting large markets with entrenched competitors. I'm afraid with taxi medallion regulations, we'll never see any competition in that space.
- dcolkitt 6y agoI don't understand the point you're making. Are you arguing that tax medallion regulations helped ride share companies enter the market?
- alisonkisk 6y agoParent was attempting sarcasm, which makes their writing essentially meaningless because the reader has to gursst if they meant what they wrote or the opposite.
- zdragnar 6y agoThey wouldn't have, had they actually obeyed the same laws and regulations. Instead, they offered a nearly identical service (arranged via app rather than hailing streetside) and skirted around all of the regulations that had kept the incumbents entrenched for so long.
- 8note 6y agoYes, and? This agrees with the statement that small companies are fluid and can find ways to work with regulations. Coming up with ways to avoid is that.
- zdragnar 6y agoI do not believe that violating the spirit, if not the letter, of laws and regulations is a good strategy for enabling small teams to disrupt large incumbents. If we want a healthy market where small and large players alike can thrive, enabling regulatory capture and expecting small players to ignore regulations as long as they can is just bad policy.
- zz_throwaway_zz 6y ago>Companies are often fluid, especially smaller ones, and can more easily adapt to a changing world. Smaller companies have less capital to expend on compliance
- tomxor 6y agoWe are people foremost, not consumers, especially in the context of privacy. Please do not use their terminology, it empowers them by framing everything in the eyes of corporate interests.
- SeriousM 6y agoWhen you enter a shop you become a customer, not a human being with feelings. Same goes for those platforms. You enter it and you become a consumer. If you're like it or not.
- amsvie 6y agoYou enter the shop as a human being, and there's certain (human) rights that should come with that. We're talking here about the right to get a copy of your own data, the right to be forgotten when you want to leave, the right to be informed about data breaches, and a right to agree to types of data processing. Your analogy is "you enter a shop and cannot leave again, may be abused, and lose control."
- Hokusai 6y agoThat makes little sense when you think about that. The constitution of your country does not stop at the door of a business. All your constitutional rights as a citizen enter the store with you. You have also human rights granted by international treaties. Nothing stops applying because you enter a shop.
- 8note 6y agoFacebook isn't selling me anything though. Neither is google
- lmilcin 6y agoIt even is sometimes weaponized to help fight competition. For example, by making it expensive to conduct a certain type of business and requiring even higher entry costs (things like certification, licences, etc.) it actually favors large, established businesses. Case in point: Uber suggesting minimum wage for their workers, some time ago. Think about this, the company refuses to recognize them as their work force but are fine to suggest a minimum wage. As it happens, the minimum wage would put their competition out of business at that time so it must have been seen as favorable for Uber. The competition was not so well funded and so this would be an attrition war at a point in time when Uber was potentially able to win it and wipe all competition out. This shows that you don't even need corrupt bureaucrats to have regulation steered this or that way by private business.
- trident5000 6y agoMy favorite is the NY LLC publishing requirement. To start a business you must publish that you started a business for 6 consecutive weeks which costs thousands. Wonder what back door corrupt deal was made on that one.
- lmilcin 6y agoI can only suspect that this made sense at some point in time when wealthy people started their day with a pipe and a magazine to read.
- trident5000 6y agoPoints to another issue that there is no active effort to reduce old laws so they just pile up.
- WaitWaitWha 6y agoGot a better one. Try to buy a car in the USA, directly from a manufacturer.
- skykooler 6y ago
- leetcrew 6y agoor put more generally, rules exist to solve someone's problem. the "problem" may or may not be the one explicitly addressed by the rule, and the "someone" is usually the person who made the rule.
- mikem170 6y agoAgreed. I'd add that most regulations are designed by career politicians and corporate lobbyists. It's too bad the people aren't empowered to design these regulations amongst ourselves.
- oblio 6y agoIt's not naive, that's why we have laws. Without laws, the people/groups you mention would just use the law of the jungle - might makes right - to get what they want. At least with laws they have to somewhat accommodate this process to get what they want, frequently compromising along the way. I'm not saying that all laws are perfect, but let's not get overwhelming cynicism get the best of us.
- typenil 6y agoBeing skeptical of the motivations of those who write and lobby for regulation is not overly cynical - it's a recognition of reality. The less skeptical we are, the more self-serving regulation we'll get.
- hugi 6y agoI am very skeptical that Facebook has ever acted in their users best interest. The EU privacy laws and the GDPR are a clearly beneficial law to citizens, protecting them against hostile companies.
- treeman79 6y agoHad a boss that tried very hard to get us to develop some Voice verification system. Apparently he knew all the right senators to get a regulation passed making it so all health companies would be forced to license our software. Wasn’t technically feasible at the time. Might be now. Freaked me out as to how evil it was.
- vkou 6y ago1. It's incredibly naive to think that the sole purpose of regulations is to protect powerful businesses. If you think that's the case, what would you describe the purpose of, say, worker safety regulations is? Food inspectors? 2. Of course they further political aims. Anything that has to do with law is political, by definition. This statement makes regulations sound scary and sinister, but actually imparts no information to the discussion. A world without regulations won't be some libertarian paradise. It'll be an authoritarian dystopia, where the powerful can do what they please, and you will have zero proactive recourse against them, and very limited reactive recourse. PS. Consider that a rule, or even aversion against regulation is itself a regulation. Which absolutely has side effects[1] that protect powerful businesses, and is pursued for personal and political aims. [1] Very obvious ones, actually.
- chrisseaton 6y ago> It's incredibly naive to think that the sole purpose of regulations is to protect powerful businesses. I listed two other example purposes in my comment alone! So obviously I don't think this. > Of course they further political aims. Did you miss the rest of the sentence? I said specifically ...even if those are not actually in the interests of any consumers.
- harry8 6y agoThis is called "Regulatory Capture" and is a form of corruption. It is not /why/ regulation exists any more than the murder of Mr Floyd is why police exist. Regulatory capture is utterly rampant right now and a huge threat to democracy. This is true regardless of one's personal politics or beliefs about big vs small government or political party of preference. It's a cancer and more dangerous than people think.
- treeman79 6y agoVote for people that want to reduce regulations. They’re easy to spot as news/entertainment all mocks them for being “mean” There is also the plainspeak people. Law written so that average people can understand them. Lawyers less needed.
- Retric 6y agoBe careful of abstract calls to action without specifics. Many calls to “reduce taxes” actually mean a subsidy for some industry in the form of targeted tax breaks. Reducing regulation just as often targets insiders as it does actually improve things. Often after a dictator takes power they do a crackdown on ‘corruption’ which has popular support. What their actually doing is consolidating power, but if you call it a corruption crackdown then it sounds like a great thing. What you want is someone that says something specific not platitudes which can mean anything, and are impossible to hold people accountable. Remove a single regulation and they can call it a win. But fail to go to the moon, build a wall, reduce spending etc, and they just failed.
- RobertoG 6y agoRegulations and laws define what game are we playing. Of course, players are going to try to change the game to their convenience. It's our work, as a society, to be watchful and try that the game is one that everybody have a chance to enjoy. You can't do that without rules, in fact you can't have a game without rules. Even private property is just a rule.
- jnxx 6y agoAlso, reguilations and rules can help to create trust, and this is what any business is based on. In this way, it helps business.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoSure. Businesses will try to protect themselves with regulation to whatever extent possible - it's what the market does (which is why I find it silly to discuss private markets and governance as if they were two separate and independent things). But "no regulations" isn't a solution to regulatory capture. It'll only make competition more cut throat (possibly involving real throats being cut), and companies more anticonsumer. (Not that any of this matters much these days - companies like Uber demonstrate that you can absolutely run an illegal operation in western countries, and end up with a double-digit billion dollars IPO.)
- MonAlternatiu 6y ago> and the 'we care for your privacy' message disappears with it I don't think so. The actions behind the words will disappear for sure, but not the message itself
- _jal 6y ago> Regulations exist to protect consumers and other companies from accusative behaviors. This is what people want to believe. But I think you'll find that regulations exist for a large number of reasons, some of which seem noble and others much less so. Frequently, they exist to provide disproportionate protections and perks to the connected.
- jnxx 6y agoWell, for whom regulation works out depends on how your government is. But also, a lack of regulation or oversight can have a lot of consequences. A good example is the Greenfell tower tragedy - fire protection authorities in the EU have warned for years about these claddings and materials, and in the EU there are not stricter regulations. And they save lives. So, when regulations do not work for your advantage as a normal citizen, maybe the problem is not the existence of regulation but the lack of democratic representation and integrity in your government and the bodies it creates and controls.
- andyjpb 6y agoI think this outlook is very much part of the reason that Britons are worried about Facebook's move to Californian terms. In the UK we do have very well established "Consumer Law" which is there explicitly to protect the consumer and recognises that they are often not otherwise in a powerful position. The most relevant stuff for Facebook is the data protection stuff, but another example, relevant to other online transactions, is the Distance Selling Regulations ( https://www.gov.uk/online-and-distance-selling-for-businesses https://www.gov.uk/online-and-distance-selling-for-businesse... ). This gives the customer the right to cancel, without a reason, for up to 14 days after the goods are delivered. If the business doesn't explicitly tell you this then your right to cancel is extended to 12 months.
- robin_reala 6y agoIt’s never “we care for your privacy” but rather “we value your privacy”, which is easy to read as “we assign a value to your privacy”. In that light, the messaging becomes clearer.
- furyg3 6y agoThis. Companies cannot feel emotions.
- smt88 6y agoMark Zuckerberg has complete control of Facebook, and he feels emotions. Elon Musk's emotions certainly dictate a lot of his companies' behavior. Companies aren't emotionless if they are essentially an extension of an individual.
- Dahoon 6y agoI disagree that Zuckerberg feels emotions.
- emptyparadise 6y agoThey sure do like to pretend they can, though.
- alkonaut 6y agoWhat’s best for a company could include doing what’s right in the eyes of its customers.
- ngold 6y agoFacebook makes 7 bucks a month on every user. Don't let Facebook make 7 bucks a month on every user.
- zz_throwaway_zz 6y ago>Regulations exist to protect consumers and other companies from accusative behaviors. Regulations exist because the government created them. Everything else is secondary.
- KorematsuFred 6y agoWhile I agree with part 1, part 2 of your argument is simply not true. The regulation has very little to do with the benevolence of our political masters towards us peasants privacy. It is the users who care about privacy (which they themselves don't really understand) which both the corporations and governments have spotted, while corporations like Apple, Google, Facebook etc. have come up different strategies for competition with each other on privacy, governments have mostly come up with nonsensical legislations most funded by these very tech companies or some other rent seeking establishment like EU. None of those regulations have made web safer for us on the contrary it has put a compliance cost on everyone. The best innovations around privacy have come from the desire to prove to users that the company respects your privacy. Regulation has mostly given us fake cookie related banners that have become a spam in themselves.
- jnxx 6y agoThe 'we care for your privacy' is not mandatory, it is just whitewashing. In fact, I see it by now as a warning sign that unnecessary processing takes place.