5 ms·

The first two could qualify as 'mass surveillance and/or stealing of private information' depending how liberally that's interpreted. Extortion is already illeg

The first two could qualify as 'mass surveillance and/or stealing of private information' depending how liberally that's interpreted. Extortion is already illegal, anyway (but then again, so are many of the prohibited activities in this license, although I suppose it's not illegal to simply 'support' them as this license prohibits).

satokema_work 6y ago
its not stealing if people are giving that information out for free or if it's just metadata, nothing immoral there
- mannerheim 6y ago
  Could be mass surveillance, depending on how liberally that's interpreted.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  > its not stealing if people are giving that information out for free If I leave a pie to cool on my windowsill and you take it it's still stealing even if there was no formal agreement or security measures in place to protect the pie. Adtech is kind of like that. If I give a calendar app access to my contacts I certainly don't expect it to take that information and use it for tracking, targeting, and marketing purposes as well. For me to "give" you that information for free, you'd have to ask for it honestly. And yet Facebook - an ad tech company - has been fighting this kind of consent in the next iOS patch tooth-and-nail.
  - a1369209993 6y ago
    > If I leave a pie to cool on my windowsill and you take it it's still stealing even if there was no formal agreement or security measures in place to protect the pie. This is a excellent analogy, thank you.
- airhead969 6y ago
  Isn't that the Office Space crime rationalization?
vkou 6y ago
Extortion is illegal, and yet, 'mugshot' businesses continue to operate in the open.
- gambiting 6y ago
  Not to mention all sort of "review" websites where your company is suddenly flooded with extremely negative reviews and you get a helpful call from the website owner being like "hey, I see you got a lot of bad reviews, but don't worry, for only $5000 you can get our premium membership that lets you get them removed". Ask me how I know.
  - stareatgoats 6y ago
    How do you know?
    - gambiting 6y ago
      Because it happened to my company. A "review your employer" website went from having few reviews of us to literally having few thousand reviews in a week(which in itself was a dead giweaway as we had maybe 50 employees total with 100 over the lifetime of the company), all extremely negative, but very simple and vague in content so you couldn't make a legal case against any one of them. We took it to a lawyer but he said that it's clearly blackmail but it would be extremely hard to get any kind of judgement against it. We just ignored it and that company eventually folded and disappeared and the website with them, but I'm pretty sure it made hiring somewhat more difficult for a while.
      - stareatgoats 6y ago
        OK thanks. Good to hear that the problem went away in your case. I was interested since I believe we need the sort of quality-control that these review websites offer - the problem is the corruption of the review process that often (always?) takes place, and the crudeness of the review parameters. Google Pagerank (or whatever it is called nowadays) is not a satisfactory quality sifting tool.

satokema_work 6y ago

its not stealing if people are giving that information out for free or if it's just metadata, nothing immoral there

mannerheim 6y ago
Could be mass surveillance, depending on how liberally that's interpreted.
AlexandrB 6y ago
> its not stealing if people are giving that information out for free If I leave a pie to cool on my windowsill and you take it it's still stealing even if there was no formal agreement or security measures in place to protect the pie. Adtech is kind of like that. If I give a calendar app access to my contacts I certainly don't expect it to take that information and use it for tracking, targeting, and marketing purposes as well. For me to "give" you that information for free, you'd have to ask for it honestly. And yet Facebook - an ad tech company - has been fighting this kind of consent in the next iOS patch tooth-and-nail.
- a1369209993 6y ago
  > If I leave a pie to cool on my windowsill and you take it it's still stealing even if there was no formal agreement or security measures in place to protect the pie. This is a excellent analogy, thank you.
airhead969 6y ago
Isn't that the Office Space crime rationalization?

vkou 6y ago

Extortion is illegal, and yet, 'mugshot' businesses continue to operate in the open.

gambiting 6y ago
Not to mention all sort of "review" websites where your company is suddenly flooded with extremely negative reviews and you get a helpful call from the website owner being like "hey, I see you got a lot of bad reviews, but don't worry, for only $5000 you can get our premium membership that lets you get them removed". Ask me how I know.
- stareatgoats 6y ago
  How do you know?
  - gambiting 6y ago
    Because it happened to my company. A "review your employer" website went from having few reviews of us to literally having few thousand reviews in a week(which in itself was a dead giweaway as we had maybe 50 employees total with 100 over the lifetime of the company), all extremely negative, but very simple and vague in content so you couldn't make a legal case against any one of them. We took it to a lawyer but he said that it's clearly blackmail but it would be extremely hard to get any kind of judgement against it. We just ignored it and that company eventually folded and disappeared and the website with them, but I'm pretty sure it made hiring somewhat more difficult for a while.
    - stareatgoats 6y ago
      OK thanks. Good to hear that the problem went away in your case. I was interested since I believe we need the sort of quality-control that these review websites offer - the problem is the corruption of the review process that often (always?) takes place, and the crudeness of the review parameters. Google Pagerank (or whatever it is called nowadays) is not a satisfactory quality sifting tool.