[Supermancho]

> The reason is to hurt you

I'm not sure how this reasoning works. Some company making money using your information isn't with intent to hurt an individual, generally speaking. It's rare that such an opportunity even exists.

[ABCLAW]

To the extent that the individual and the marketer's interests are not aligned, the harm is borne entirely by the individual. It doesn't matter if the intention is to harm the individual; a blatant disregard for their interests accomplishes the same thing at scale. Not caring about what occurs to the individual means that systemically decisions will be made at their detriment.

Get put in a filter bubble? Have your government track you for protesting? Get on the wrong side of grey market price discrimination? Have your access to data and websites revoked?

Parties to a transaction that have no power don't come out ahead.

[Supermancho]

>> The reason is to hurt you and it's unfortunate that we're in denial about it.

> To the extent that the individual and the marketer's interests are not aligned, the harm is borne entirely by the individual. It doesn't matter if the intention is to harm the individual

Of course it does. That's the claim. Don't bring up tangential subjects and then try to associate them as if it's a rephrasing.

[neolog]

GP is saying disregard for the population's interests (plural "you") is equivalent to intending to harm many individual "you"s.

[horsawlarway]

I agree that intent matters, but lack of intent is not a get out of jail free card.

There's a reason both murder and manslaughter are crimes.

[2pEXgD0fZ5cF]

In some way they actually DO have the goal to hurt you though, specifically because it is aligned with their way of making money. When it comes to the attempt to shackle you onto their platform, increase "engagement" (outrage and negative emotion), put dark patterns into place to make leaving as hurtful as possible, and also invading the privacy of people not even directly using their platform. [1]

Facebook hurting you might be because they want the money, but they specifically choose to make money by hurting you, and society. [2][3]

So in the end I don't think it is wrong to phrase it that way. Someone beating you up in exchange for money still has the goal of beating you up.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/health/facebook-psycholog...

[2]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03007995.2021.1...

[3]: https://www.aeaweb.org/research/social-media-news%20consumpt...

[ggggtez]

My data is worth money, that's why they want it. If they take it from me without permission, how is that not stealing? And then isn't stealing obviously hurting me?

Just because you don't know how much your data is worth, and may not even know the crime happened, doesn't make it not a crime or not harmful.

Consider voyeurs who take upskirt photos. Even though the victim may never know that data was stolen, it's undeniable that it's an invasion of privacy and often a criminal offence.

[j_koreth]

Isn't it disingenuous to say it's stealing? From my perspective, I would be exchanging my data with the services provided and if I have a problem with the level of data collection I can always stop using the service and delete my account. I'm sure there are services today that are useful to me that are not possible without data monetization.

[lumost]

It's a question of degree, I don't inherently mind being advertised too or getting targeted advertisements. I do mind having my entire location history known by many parties.

I can get the former largely without the latter. I am concerned when a random app has access to the latter because they feel entitled to collect it by virtue of installation.

[kortilla]

> My data is worth money, that's why they want it. If they take it from me without permission, how is that not stealing?

Because it’s not actually yours and you didn’t create it. It’s about you which is a critical difference.

If you connect to a web server and it records a standard access log of a timestamp that it received a request from a given IP address, that’s data 100% generated by the server. That’s not “your data” any more than a recording from a surveillance camera at a gas station you frequent is “your video”.

[IAmGraydon]

The number of leaps you made in this one short post is truly astounding.

[Supermancho]

> If they take it from me without permission, how is that not stealing?

They don't take it. The value of your information is either inherent (is all information inherently valuable somehow?) or in how it can be used. There is no information "staked claim" as with a natural resource. If you don't have the infrastructure and relationships, you can't monetize it... similar to natural resources. Maybe there should be an individual "staked claim" (which is what the GDPR mostly does), but arguing as if it's a given because "I should be able to make money and nobody else should" is not compelling. This is why there are so few laws regarding it and there's the inherent quasi-legal issue of tracking someone's "staked claim" without tracking them.

[rodgerd]

> Some company making money using your information isn't with intent to hurt an individual

The Mercer family didn't personally want to kill, imprison, or cripple a bunch of people, but that's certainly what they achieved with their opiod business.

[amusedcyclist]

The hyperbole against adtech on hackernews is insane. I swear most people here think its the biggest problem that the world faces.

[riversflow]

I mean, it arguably drives the out-of-control materialism that is currently devastating the environment. Not sure it’s hyperbole.

[amusedcyclist]

Yeah I'm no fan of it either, but i don't think its responsible for materialism in our society, thats been around much longer than adtech.

[nathias]

It's the biggest problem the online world faces? It's structurally unsound and it's making itself into the foundations of the future world in general.

[zibzab]

Maybe we are among the few people who understands the issue??

I mean, grandma isn't going to figure this out on her own. She is happy to have a way to get in touch with her grandchildren and has no idea she is being exploited.

[amusedcyclist]

Or maybe our sense of whats important is warped because of the bubble we live in ?