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Why is it desirable for Congress to make laws limiting how electronics manufacturers can design their electronics? If Facebook wants to make a VR headset that

by akerl_ 5y ago

Why is it desirable for Congress to make laws limiting how electronics manufacturers can design their electronics? If Facebook wants to make a VR headset that requires that you upload a monthly video of you doing the chicken dance, just don’t buy their product. Attempting to use government to make private entities build the kinds of technology you like is a pretty heavy hammer to drop on individual freedoms.

Kaze404 5y ago
Companies are not individuals.
- ksdale 5y ago
  I'm no corporate shill, but corporations are groups of people, so anything you think it's ok to take away from them because they're a group and not a person, you could logically take away from, say, a union or a farmer's market. If it was wise to make that law regarding facebook, would it be wise to make it regarding an individual as well, or should individuals be allowed to do it because they're not groups? And if individuals shouldn't be allowed to do it, then it's not really about the distinction between corporations and individuals.
  - rhacker 5y ago
    So backing up out of that for a second. Are you saying there are individuals (not part of a group, or a corporation) that are dead set on making computer peripherals that require an account?
    - ksdale 5y ago
      Is that relevant? I think the analysis should revolve around whether they should be allowed to, and not whether we can just ban it because nobody wants to do it anyway. I don't think that's a good way to make rules.
  - tpxl 5y ago
    The connection between corps and unions/farmers markets is clear to me, but the jump between unions/farmers markets to individuals is not. Yes, I do think groups should not have rights individuals have. It's more about the scale than the amount of people, and the line between that gets blurred when an individual can control thousands of PCs.
    - ksdale 5y ago
      For example, individuals are entitled to freedom of assembly, the ability to, say, gather and push for better labor conditions. If we restrict the rights of groups, would the government suddenly say, "Well sure, each of you can ask for labor rights individually, but you can't gather together to do it, because groups shouldn't have the same rights as individuals." I suppose, I don't think the line between groups and individuals is quite so clear. When does a group become "greater" than the individual in a way that requires the individual to give up certain rights?
rhacker 5y ago
> Why is it desirable for Congress Humans are dumb and they buy it, and it sets the precedent. We have to make laws sometimes. You can barely even buy a TV without smart features now and yet everyone that knows about such features that don't want them still HAVE to buy them if they want a gd tv. Should we just make it legal for oil companies to have no consequences for oil spills because it doesn't really affect much, we can just stop eating fish in the sea. There's still plenty of food elsewhere.
- akerl_ 5y ago
  Maybe they’re not dumb and they’re making their own choices differently than you make yours. Oil spills harm the environment. We regulate them because the ocean can’t just choose to not receive the oil, not out of a desire to make sure we can keep eating fish. EDIT: To say the thing out loud: I buy smart TVs on purpose, and I’d like to think I’m a smart person who understands the technology involved. Is the case you’re making that I am in fact dumb?
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Ed Snowden might https://mashable.com/article/wikileaks-snowden-interview https://mashable.com/article/wikileaks-snowden-interview
  - rhacker 5y ago
    Well, I think all of them are dumb, including me. I'm not going to finger point at you specifically and call you dumb because that is rude (unfortunately yes, my subtext is). I'd say half of my choices are dumb, and yes when we find that most of the time people are making dumb choices that put humanity in a worse and worse situation, maybe it's time to drop in some laws to slow that down. I mean go and look at the other HN thread on 100K US deaths per year on plastic. I mean I bought plastic today and highly likely will do so again tomorrow.
    - akerl_ 5y ago
      I might recommend taking a step back and re-examining this stance and considering the possibility that there are people who disagree with your stance because they hold different opinions and values, not just because they’re dumb.
steve76 5y ago
Big rich guy, if you're so smart and good, why do you need a bailout?
jdc 5y ago
How about the freedom to use your property, electronic or otherwise, as you see fit?
- akerl_ 5y ago
  Oculus isn’t secretive about the cloud account requirement. When you go to buy it, you’re buying it as Facebook chose to build it. And once you have the hardware you own it. But they aren’t required to sell you a device that works the way you wish it did. If the pitch here was that vendors were lying about cloud/connectivity requirements, and we wanted legislation to prevent them from obscuring the truth, I’d be 100% down. Thankfully, we already have those laws.
  - malermeister 5y ago
    Just because they aren't secretive about it doesn't mean it's an okay thing to do. Doing a bad thing out in the open might make it shameless, but it doesn't make it acceptable.
    - akerl_ 5y ago
      I’m saying it’s not clear to me why it’s a bad thing. It’s clear that you want them to design a different VR headset, but I wish IKEA made a different depth Kallax shelf and yet I’m not looking to make it a legal requirement.
      - hobs 5y ago
        Designing things around safety is something IKEA already has to do, and regulations about materials, heights of products, etc all play into that. The IKEA bookshelf doesn't violate your privacy nor have an always on connection to a much more powerful entity always looking to make another buck. The IKEA bookshelf isn't an avenue for your attention and your time - whereas things like gambling (considered addictive and regulated by almost everyone) are - and we regulate them heavily. Why would Facebook with its billions be exempt from regulation? It's not something we "want" - its to make their product basically useful without the IKEA subscription service to make sure your shelf doesn't fall apart every month.
MereInterest 5y ago
Because freedom can be infringed upon by more than just the government. The market is not infallible, and must be curtailed in order to protect individual rights.
- akerl_ 5y ago
  What individual right is being violated here?
paranoidrobot 5y ago
> just don’t buy their product. That works in theory, but in practice when all the products from all the vendors work that way, you no longer have a choice. Plenty of examples like that - Try buying a TV that's not a "smart" TV nowdays, you basically can't. If you want a good quality picture, then it's also coming with telemetry and in many cases advertisements, too.
- akerl_ 5y ago
  This is a VR headset. It’s hardly a basic necessity
  - bloqs 5y ago
    This was said about phones 10 years ago, and electricity 100 years before that.
    - akerl_ 5y ago
      I was being flippant in my comment above, but just to be clear: I think regulating business models for cell phones is just as bad an idea. Electrical service has limitations around things like termination of service / fair pricing / safety, but we don’t mandate how they design their software and servers.
      - Apocryphon 5y ago
        What about their comment on the lack of non-smart TVs?
        akerl_ 5y ago
        There are plenty of non-smart TVs. They just cost more than smart TVs. You can find them at any number of suppliers, and they’re still bought in large numbers by businesses.
      - HWR_14 5y ago
        > I think regulating business models for cell phones is just as bad an idea. I mean, we can mandate minimum services. Something that has a webbrowser, email client, texts and calls. If you want to say that apps don't fit into that, I suppose that works.
loktarogar 5y ago
If I spend $50,000 on a tractor that also has a cloud component that drives the tractor around for me, is it also not fair to expect that I can use that tractor just as a tractor if I don't have internet access at my farm? It's a different story if it's eg. an Alexa device thats primary purpose is to be connected to the internet. If a device is in a class of product that doesn't necessarily need a cloud connection/account/whatever, it shouldn't require it. Often it's not practical to switch to a competing product. Sometimes it's not possible at all. Consumers should have rights here, and it's legislation's job to provide them, in a just society.
- akerl_ 5y ago
  If when you bought the tractor, the tractor company said “this tractor requires that you have internet access and keep the tractor online”, and you bought it, then no, it’s not fair of you to expect to just disregard that. Now, if you want to take a screwdriver and serial cable to the tractor and hack the crap out it, and you manage to bypass the requirement, have at it. You own the tractor. They can feel free to void your warranty / not give you updates, but you can do whatever you want with your property. But to buy a device that says “internet connection required” and then be angry when it requires an internet connection doesn’t make sense to me, nor does asking the government to mandate the business model used by tractor (or VR headset) manufacturers.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - loktarogar 5y ago
    Okay, now picture a world where all high end tractors have this functionality. Companies have determined that's what they're going to offer the customer and they'll brick any attempts at modifying the hardware. They're making money refining their AI and selling off customer data, so why not? You need the high end tractors because they're the only machines that meet the requirements of what you're doing. This is what the legislation folks want to stave off. It's in a similar vein to the right to repair movement (which is dealing with similar restrictions right now, in the real world - see John Deere tractors).
malermeister 5y ago
Because government power is not the only power capable of suppressing individual freedoms. Corporate power is too and we need the government to keep it in check. Case in point, Facebook trying to restrict how you use hardware you own.
- sgregnt 5y ago
  The example with facebook is quite different from Gov. Your interaction with facebook is 100% voluntarily, you don't like facebook then you can say bye! With the government you have no room for flexibility.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    You have this backwards. Facebook wants to sell in the US market. There are rules to follow if facebook doesn't want to join this market they are free to choose not to. Same as you are not forced to use facebook.
    - akerl_ 5y ago
      Facebook is following the rules that exist. The discussion in this thread is whether or not it’s a good idea to add a rule that says whether a keyboard can require a cloud service. Now I think that keyboards that require cloud service are a stupid product, but if somebody wants to make one, I don’t think it’s the government’s job to ban them from making the attempt.
      - malermeister 5y ago
        This approach is naive in that it completely ignores the outsized influence a corporation like Facebook has on the market. This isn't you making a free decision between competitors, like in an idealized econ 101 example. Facebook has already used its money to consolidate its grasp on the standalone VR market - can you think of a viable competitor to an Oculus Quest? Should people just have to put up with privacy abuses or be excluded from VR altogether? When the market fails, it's time for the government to step in.
dmead 5y ago
Actually it's completely fine and pretty narrow. Allowing tones of resources and brains to be dumped into the advertising industry is a pretty terrible use of what we usually call a "society".
ghostly_s 5y ago
> just don't but their product What alternatives are even available for standalone VR? Vive has something that's about 4x the price...
- akerl_ 5y ago
  I think you just answered your own question.
jtsuken 5y ago
It is desirable for any country to have laws that limit the ways how legal or government entities collect data. Some of the strictest privacy laws existed in Germany for a reason, because the country new what an SS or a Stasi would do with the data once it gets its hands on it. Some of the laxest privacy laws are in the US, the country whose businesses supplied the SS[1] and nowadays the CCP[2] with surveillance technology to facilitate genocide. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust [2]https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/us-tech-products-08052021185345.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/us-tech-products-080...
ipaddr 5y ago
Your freedom stops when you decide not to make your own oculus and use the common market. Using that market you are governed by all kind of rules like safety around food, lemon laws around purchases, laws that protect against predatory practices like bait and switch.
javajosh 5y ago
Because the market is imperfect. There is a profound information asymmetry between the consumer and the purveyor of high-tech products, and this asymmetry is exploited to raise the price of the product, in secret, without customer consent. This is, of course, fraud. Why doesn't current law apply? I think it does. But courts are funny: when fraud becomes common and accepted, and people cease to recognize it as fraud, it becomes acceptable. In those cases, a new law is reasonable.
Bayart 5y ago
Because the natural behavioural pattern of dominant companies is single-minded resource extraction, including from the commons which the government is in charge of safeguarding. On top of it the relationship they have to private citizens is extremely asymmetric. All-consuming capitalism isn't a public liberty, and if companies are in the mind of lowering costs by using cancer-inducing materials, slave work, corruption or indeed trading people's very identities, then it's in the purview of political institutions to intervene.
spurgu 5y ago
I'm right now watching "The Billion Dollar Code" on Netflix and due to that I have an answer readily at hand: Someone needs to stand up to the big guys exerting excessive power and force[0]. [0] This phenomenom is inherent to and a natural byproduct of a free market, which is why regulation and laws are essential to keep some sort of balance.
satellite2 5y ago
Because different people have different expectations for a given product and some level of expertise is required to understand basic requirements which most people don't have. For instance most people don't know what is an acceptable level for various pollutants in drinking water. As such if there was no government oversight most people would be happy drinking poluted water and the few that care wouldn't be serviced as the cost of cleaning water for a niche wouldn't make it profitable. But hopefully we have laws that dictate safe levels and vendors have to respect them. For hardware it's the same, experts are pretty clear about the risks: at the most basic level if hardware stop to function when some server crash then the whole society becomes dependant on this and as such any outages starts to have catastrophic consequences by domino effect. On the spying activity linked to those accounts the risk is pretty clear as well: it opens people to leaks of intimate details about their life to Facebook employees and various hackers in case of failure. So it seems clear that public safety would require making those two activities illegal.
honkycat 5y ago
Because this is something people purchased, and then the log-in requirements were added later.

by akerl_ 5y ago

Kaze404 5y ago

Companies are not individuals.

ksdale 5y ago
I'm no corporate shill, but corporations are groups of people, so anything you think it's ok to take away from them because they're a group and not a person, you could logically take away from, say, a union or a farmer's market. If it was wise to make that law regarding facebook, would it be wise to make it regarding an individual as well, or should individuals be allowed to do it because they're not groups? And if individuals shouldn't be allowed to do it, then it's not really about the distinction between corporations and individuals.
- rhacker 5y ago
  So backing up out of that for a second. Are you saying there are individuals (not part of a group, or a corporation) that are dead set on making computer peripherals that require an account?
  - ksdale 5y ago
    Is that relevant? I think the analysis should revolve around whether they should be allowed to, and not whether we can just ban it because nobody wants to do it anyway. I don't think that's a good way to make rules.
- tpxl 5y ago
  The connection between corps and unions/farmers markets is clear to me, but the jump between unions/farmers markets to individuals is not. Yes, I do think groups should not have rights individuals have. It's more about the scale than the amount of people, and the line between that gets blurred when an individual can control thousands of PCs.
  - ksdale 5y ago
    For example, individuals are entitled to freedom of assembly, the ability to, say, gather and push for better labor conditions. If we restrict the rights of groups, would the government suddenly say, "Well sure, each of you can ask for labor rights individually, but you can't gather together to do it, because groups shouldn't have the same rights as individuals." I suppose, I don't think the line between groups and individuals is quite so clear. When does a group become "greater" than the individual in a way that requires the individual to give up certain rights?

rhacker 5y ago

> Why is it desirable for Congress Humans are dumb and they buy it, and it sets the precedent. We have to make laws sometimes. You can barely even buy a TV without smart features now and yet everyone that knows about such features that don't want them still HAVE to buy them if they want a gd tv. Should we just make it legal for oil companies to have no consequences for oil spills because it doesn't really affect much, we can just stop eating fish in the sea. There's still plenty of food elsewhere.

akerl_ 5y ago
Maybe they’re not dumb and they’re making their own choices differently than you make yours. Oil spills harm the environment. We regulate them because the ocean can’t just choose to not receive the oil, not out of a desire to make sure we can keep eating fish. EDIT: To say the thing out loud: I buy smart TVs on purpose, and I’d like to think I’m a smart person who understands the technology involved. Is the case you’re making that I am in fact dumb?
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Ed Snowden might https://mashable.com/article/wikileaks-snowden-interview https://mashable.com/article/wikileaks-snowden-interview
- rhacker 5y ago
  Well, I think all of them are dumb, including me. I'm not going to finger point at you specifically and call you dumb because that is rude (unfortunately yes, my subtext is). I'd say half of my choices are dumb, and yes when we find that most of the time people are making dumb choices that put humanity in a worse and worse situation, maybe it's time to drop in some laws to slow that down. I mean go and look at the other HN thread on 100K US deaths per year on plastic. I mean I bought plastic today and highly likely will do so again tomorrow.
  - akerl_ 5y ago
    I might recommend taking a step back and re-examining this stance and considering the possibility that there are people who disagree with your stance because they hold different opinions and values, not just because they’re dumb.

steve76 5y ago

Big rich guy, if you're so smart and good, why do you need a bailout?

jdc 5y ago

How about the freedom to use your property, electronic or otherwise, as you see fit?

akerl_ 5y ago
Oculus isn’t secretive about the cloud account requirement. When you go to buy it, you’re buying it as Facebook chose to build it. And once you have the hardware you own it. But they aren’t required to sell you a device that works the way you wish it did. If the pitch here was that vendors were lying about cloud/connectivity requirements, and we wanted legislation to prevent them from obscuring the truth, I’d be 100% down. Thankfully, we already have those laws.
- malermeister 5y ago
  Just because they aren't secretive about it doesn't mean it's an okay thing to do. Doing a bad thing out in the open might make it shameless, but it doesn't make it acceptable.
  - akerl_ 5y ago
    I’m saying it’s not clear to me why it’s a bad thing. It’s clear that you want them to design a different VR headset, but I wish IKEA made a different depth Kallax shelf and yet I’m not looking to make it a legal requirement.
    - hobs 5y ago
      Designing things around safety is something IKEA already has to do, and regulations about materials, heights of products, etc all play into that. The IKEA bookshelf doesn't violate your privacy nor have an always on connection to a much more powerful entity always looking to make another buck. The IKEA bookshelf isn't an avenue for your attention and your time - whereas things like gambling (considered addictive and regulated by almost everyone) are - and we regulate them heavily. Why would Facebook with its billions be exempt from regulation? It's not something we "want" - its to make their product basically useful without the IKEA subscription service to make sure your shelf doesn't fall apart every month.

MereInterest 5y ago

Because freedom can be infringed upon by more than just the government. The market is not infallible, and must be curtailed in order to protect individual rights.

akerl_ 5y ago
What individual right is being violated here?

paranoidrobot 5y ago

> just don’t buy their product. That works in theory, but in practice when all the products from all the vendors work that way, you no longer have a choice. Plenty of examples like that - Try buying a TV that's not a "smart" TV nowdays, you basically can't. If you want a good quality picture, then it's also coming with telemetry and in many cases advertisements, too.

akerl_ 5y ago
This is a VR headset. It’s hardly a basic necessity
- bloqs 5y ago
  This was said about phones 10 years ago, and electricity 100 years before that.
  - akerl_ 5y ago
    I was being flippant in my comment above, but just to be clear: I think regulating business models for cell phones is just as bad an idea. Electrical service has limitations around things like termination of service / fair pricing / safety, but we don’t mandate how they design their software and servers.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      What about their comment on the lack of non-smart TVs?
      - akerl_ 5y ago
        There are plenty of non-smart TVs. They just cost more than smart TVs. You can find them at any number of suppliers, and they’re still bought in large numbers by businesses.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      > I think regulating business models for cell phones is just as bad an idea. I mean, we can mandate minimum services. Something that has a webbrowser, email client, texts and calls. If you want to say that apps don't fit into that, I suppose that works.

loktarogar 5y ago

If I spend $50,000 on a tractor that also has a cloud component that drives the tractor around for me, is it also not fair to expect that I can use that tractor just as a tractor if I don't have internet access at my farm? It's a different story if it's eg. an Alexa device thats primary purpose is to be connected to the internet. If a device is in a class of product that doesn't necessarily need a cloud connection/account/whatever, it shouldn't require it. Often it's not practical to switch to a competing product. Sometimes it's not possible at all. Consumers should have rights here, and it's legislation's job to provide them, in a just society.

akerl_ 5y ago
If when you bought the tractor, the tractor company said “this tractor requires that you have internet access and keep the tractor online”, and you bought it, then no, it’s not fair of you to expect to just disregard that. Now, if you want to take a screwdriver and serial cable to the tractor and hack the crap out it, and you manage to bypass the requirement, have at it. You own the tractor. They can feel free to void your warranty / not give you updates, but you can do whatever you want with your property. But to buy a device that says “internet connection required” and then be angry when it requires an internet connection doesn’t make sense to me, nor does asking the government to mandate the business model used by tractor (or VR headset) manufacturers.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- loktarogar 5y ago
  Okay, now picture a world where all high end tractors have this functionality. Companies have determined that's what they're going to offer the customer and they'll brick any attempts at modifying the hardware. They're making money refining their AI and selling off customer data, so why not? You need the high end tractors because they're the only machines that meet the requirements of what you're doing. This is what the legislation folks want to stave off. It's in a similar vein to the right to repair movement (which is dealing with similar restrictions right now, in the real world - see John Deere tractors).

malermeister 5y ago

Because government power is not the only power capable of suppressing individual freedoms. Corporate power is too and we need the government to keep it in check. Case in point, Facebook trying to restrict how you use hardware you own.

sgregnt 5y ago
The example with facebook is quite different from Gov. Your interaction with facebook is 100% voluntarily, you don't like facebook then you can say bye! With the government you have no room for flexibility.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  You have this backwards. Facebook wants to sell in the US market. There are rules to follow if facebook doesn't want to join this market they are free to choose not to. Same as you are not forced to use facebook.
  - akerl_ 5y ago
    Facebook is following the rules that exist. The discussion in this thread is whether or not it’s a good idea to add a rule that says whether a keyboard can require a cloud service. Now I think that keyboards that require cloud service are a stupid product, but if somebody wants to make one, I don’t think it’s the government’s job to ban them from making the attempt.
    - malermeister 5y ago
      This approach is naive in that it completely ignores the outsized influence a corporation like Facebook has on the market. This isn't you making a free decision between competitors, like in an idealized econ 101 example. Facebook has already used its money to consolidate its grasp on the standalone VR market - can you think of a viable competitor to an Oculus Quest? Should people just have to put up with privacy abuses or be excluded from VR altogether? When the market fails, it's time for the government to step in.

dmead 5y ago

Actually it's completely fine and pretty narrow. Allowing tones of resources and brains to be dumped into the advertising industry is a pretty terrible use of what we usually call a "society".

ghostly_s 5y ago

> just don't but their product What alternatives are even available for standalone VR? Vive has something that's about 4x the price...

akerl_ 5y ago
I think you just answered your own question.

jtsuken 5y ago

It is desirable for any country to have laws that limit the ways how legal or government entities collect data. Some of the strictest privacy laws existed in Germany for a reason, because the country new what an SS or a Stasi would do with the data once it gets its hands on it. Some of the laxest privacy laws are in the US, the country whose businesses supplied the SS[1] and nowadays the CCP[2] with surveillance technology to facilitate genocide. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust [2]https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/us-tech-products-08052021185345.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/us-tech-products-080...

ipaddr 5y ago

Your freedom stops when you decide not to make your own oculus and use the common market. Using that market you are governed by all kind of rules like safety around food, lemon laws around purchases, laws that protect against predatory practices like bait and switch.

javajosh 5y ago

Because the market is imperfect. There is a profound information asymmetry between the consumer and the purveyor of high-tech products, and this asymmetry is exploited to raise the price of the product, in secret, without customer consent. This is, of course, fraud. Why doesn't current law apply? I think it does. But courts are funny: when fraud becomes common and accepted, and people cease to recognize it as fraud, it becomes acceptable. In those cases, a new law is reasonable.

Bayart 5y ago

Because the natural behavioural pattern of dominant companies is single-minded resource extraction, including from the commons which the government is in charge of safeguarding. On top of it the relationship they have to private citizens is extremely asymmetric. All-consuming capitalism isn't a public liberty, and if companies are in the mind of lowering costs by using cancer-inducing materials, slave work, corruption or indeed trading people's very identities, then it's in the purview of political institutions to intervene.

spurgu 5y ago

I'm right now watching "The Billion Dollar Code" on Netflix and due to that I have an answer readily at hand: Someone needs to stand up to the big guys exerting excessive power and force[0]. [0] This phenomenom is inherent to and a natural byproduct of a free market, which is why regulation and laws are essential to keep some sort of balance.

satellite2 5y ago

Because different people have different expectations for a given product and some level of expertise is required to understand basic requirements which most people don't have. For instance most people don't know what is an acceptable level for various pollutants in drinking water. As such if there was no government oversight most people would be happy drinking poluted water and the few that care wouldn't be serviced as the cost of cleaning water for a niche wouldn't make it profitable. But hopefully we have laws that dictate safe levels and vendors have to respect them. For hardware it's the same, experts are pretty clear about the risks: at the most basic level if hardware stop to function when some server crash then the whole society becomes dependant on this and as such any outages starts to have catastrophic consequences by domino effect. On the spying activity linked to those accounts the risk is pretty clear as well: it opens people to leaks of intimate details about their life to Facebook employees and various hackers in case of failure. So it seems clear that public safety would require making those two activities illegal.

honkycat 5y ago

Because this is something people purchased, and then the log-in requirements were added later.