Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kerkeslager 2525 days ago
Pledging to stop and stopping are two very different things.

Pledging to stop is pretty standard operating procedure whenever bad privacy practices cause a PR stink, but it's quite common to see the same company with the same PR stink a year or two later. Pledges to stop often have more to do with the media cycle than any actual intention to stop.

2 comments

Yeah, a good example of this is Pepsi pledging to remove Brominated Vegetable Oil from their drinks in response to a campaign by a young student that caught media attention. Years later, they never did any such thing.
Which really makes no sense when you think about it because it's already illegal in Europe and Japan so might as well just remove it altogether.
It all depends on the monetary difference doing so makes. If it's significantly cheaper, then they will continue to include it for legal markets.
Right. Last year (2018) they pledged to stop. Then didn't. Then this year they pledged again.

We'll see...

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/after-broken-pro...