[mwill]

Semi-related, not exactly a dark pattern put a job I bailed on early in my career for ethical reasons.

I was hired to build a rudimentary tool for detecting nudity in images, over large datasets, as fast as possible/reasonable, with a pretty generous margin of error. The agreed pay was extremely good for the performance the client wanted.

Not long after I started, after getting an advance payment, one of the clients called me and very tactfully broke the news to me that what they actually wanted was a tool that would detect women in bikinis, or showing lots of skin, and that they would be crawling social media and photo sharing sites, and their 'service' was a private premium forum that included a section where members could trade pictures of girls they knew, and they wanted to add a gallery of girls who post bikini pictures, with their real names and locations and links to their socials.

I re-payed the advance that day, and it very much shaped my approach to consulting.

[hughrr]

That sounds about right. I was interviewed for a fairly well known company on contract a number of years ago. I was told the product was top secret and it was going to be amazing etc etc.

So roll in on first day after signing up to fuck knows what and it was a ticket touting company. I listened to their pitch which lasted until lunch, went and got myself a sandwich, sat on a bench and thought “fuck it, this is wrong” and just went home.

When I told the agent he went crazy at me because I’d burned his commission. Gave them the finger too. In some places it’s bastards all the way down.

Next time someone pulled that on me, I cut the interview off and only worked for predefined work for a number of years. If something is off grid on your contract, no is the answer.

[sbarre]

For anyone wondering (I had to look it up):

ticket touting = ticket scalping.

[jacobsenscott]

What's unethical about ticket scalping?

[phkahler]

>> What's unethical about ticket scalping?

It artificially inflates ticket prices by inserting a completely unnecessary middle-man in the purchase process. This is done by people with no intent to actually use the tickets they bought, so it's very much not the same as "oh I can't go would you like to buy my ticket?"

This is similar to a dark pattern I've seen at shopping malls where they offer a valet service, but also rope off all the close parking spaces for valet. This creates an artificial scarcity of close parking spaces which helps to drive the valet business. If they never did this there would be little desire for the valet service.

[fennecfoxen]

> It artificially inflates ticket prices

On the contrary, it naturally inflates the price.

Tickets that can be scalped were priced at below what you might naively consider "market" prices. The purchasers gain some value from this, and usually the sellers do too — often in the form of hype, perennially useful for promotional purposes. Someone who scored a hard-to-get ticket for a good price is likely quite excited about it.

But the difference means there is a strong incentive to turn the difference into cash, and even with inefficient processes in the middle, that incentive is substantial.

You can of course spend all day saying it's "wrong" and it's a position you are welcome to take; there are interesting questions we could ask about who should rightly "own" abstractions like the hype, and why, but it is not protected by normal property law, and if property rights don't exist or aren't enforced then you know that the necessary conditions for free-market efficiency do not exist.

But again, it's as natural as any other economic effect.

[bun_at_work]

How is the price inflation natural? The supply-demand relationship is unnaturally muddled with when someone restricts supply by purchasing all the tickets at once, especially with automated tools average consumers don't have/use. They then just resell the tickets - not at some supply-demand balanced value, but at their determined value, often 200%+ the original price.

Supply is already fixed on things like tickets anyway, due to venue sizes, so this is just further restriction. It's not natural.

[phkahler]

>> Tickets that can be scalped were priced at below what you might naively consider "market" prices.

Maybe. The scalpers are taking a risk buying tickets they may not sell, so it might serve as a mechanism to find the market price for the tickets. OTOH it also creates artificial scarcity which artificially raises the price.

In the end, the scalper is inserting themself into a transaction between two parties that didn't ask for them to do so and were mutually satisfied with the situation prior to that (nothing changed for the seller, and I think most buyers would appreciate the lower price).

[ska]

> But again, it's as natural as any other economic effect.

Often I hear people supporting scalping as an example of a free market working, and I get that argument.

The problem is the market that actually exists is anything but free, and largely based on deceptive practices and even outright collusion, which is I think what is what a lot of people really object to.

[dmd]

Yeah, that makes no sense. Valet should use the farthest spaces possible.

[ydlr]

> >> What's unethical about ticket scalping?

> It artificially inflates ticket prices by inserting a completely unnecessary middle-man in the purchase process. This is done by people with no intent to actually use the tickets they bought, so it's very much not the same as "oh I can't go would you like to buy my ticket?"

I think this is called "retail."

[ratherbefuddled]

Retailers are generally providing a service. Somewhere to go and look at and try out a product, many products conveniently under one roof. Scalpers / touts are not, they are parasites.

[ehutch79]

Not really, as scalpers insert themselves between a retail ticket vendor, and the consumer.

[neitherboosh]

Fans who really want to see their favorite artist/sports teams get extorted, and the money goes to scalpers instead of the artists and venues which are actually providing value. Scalpers provide no value to society.

[randomraccoon]

Planet Money has done an excellent episode on this - https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/25/195641030/epis.... While I broadly agree with this, I would say that scalpers can actually provide a service of exchanging money for time and convenience. For example, you may have a free or cheap concert that sells out extremely quickly, but with scalpers, those with lots of money can always get a ticket. Much of the economy is built on the similar concept of arbitrage, where someone buys something cheaply and sells it for a markup to those who lack the ability or knowledge to get it from the seller's source.

That said, scalpers in particular seem to cause a whole lot more harm than good in general. As the above podcast addresses, it's a very difficult problem to solve systemically if you are intentionally undervaluing your goods.

[swagasaurus-rex]

Sounds like an oxymoron. Like hoarding toilet paper, gasoline, water during times of emergency, it limits the true supply.

You could argue the “true price” is what the scalpers charge (who will stop drinking water when the prices skyrocket?).

But in reality they squeeze the supply to create artificial scarcity. Any economist knows this is market manipulation.

[ketzo]

> For example, you may have a free or cheap concert that sells out extremely quickly, but with scalpers, those with lots of money can always get a ticket.

But how do you square that with scalpers causing the tickets to sell out so quickly? I mean, they're the ones creating their own market. They're not really providing a service if they're the ones creating the annoying need for the service in the first place.

[pao]

Come on, man.

Remember those guys last year who would drive around buying up all the masks, selling them online for 10x? You don't know why everybody hated them? This is why:

The original seller has a reputation to protect and doesn't want to be seen as taking advantage. Maybe it's a musician who would rather sell to kids who are willing to wait in line than to whoever has the most money. Maybe a pharmacy selling masks in 2020. The arbitrage opportunity is for somebody with no reputation or scruples, who chooses to see themselves as just an Angel of the Free Market. To everyone else, he's a jerk.

[rvense]

I like to call this line of thinking "capitalist determinism". Basically, if there is money to be made, it must be made. Letting any other concern interfere with this extracting of value is silly, or unnatural - even immoral.

People talk about it in these detached terms, call it laws of economics and say that it is something that happens naturally. But of course, when one remembers that these so-called laws of economics describes interactions between people, and that you always can choose what kind of influence you want to have on the world.

[mjburgess]

It's a weird one.

Events should auction off a percentage of tickets, and reserve a percentage "for fans" -- and all fixed to a name & photo id.

One has to suspect that many events are in-cahoots with scalpers, and are just pricing their tickets below the market for PR reasons.

[sbarre]

> all fixed to a name & photo id

You're not the first to think of this I assure you.

Most modern scalper platforms collect your credit card and personal info in advance and use it to buy your ticket with their bot. So even if the venue is matching purchase info to your ID and credit card, it all lines up.

Scalpers aren't hawking tickets on show night 200 feet from the venue on the sidewalk anymore.

You pre-buy through them to guarantee that you'll get the ticket you want since everything sells out super fast (because of scalpers!) and you pay the markup for that service.

[matt74827289]

People tend to not like scalping of any products, it raises the price of the product while adding little to no value. The hate towards scalping is quite visible in the GPU market due to its limited supply

[Causality1]

Is there anything not unethical about ticket scalping? Tickets being non-essential entertainment is the only reason it's legal.

[gjsman-1000]

You know what? I know that scraping is currently legal, but then we end up with things like that company or Clearview AI. We need some laws, ASAP, prohibiting data for being scraped for specific reasons.

Also, I have some friends in insurance companies, and they say that the insurance companies right now are actively trying to learn how to scrape people's social media - secretly - so they can catch "dangerous" behavior or violations of their rules. My dad's client was telling how there was a guy who was running a happy hour secretly in his insured bar, and his company which scraped Facebook found posts from other people saying "great happy hour at this bar", he reported it to the insurance company, and they sent the bar the bill. That's freaky and should be illegal as a violation of privacy.

[squiggleblaz]

> You know what? I know that scraping is currently legal, but then we end up with things like that company or Clearview AI. We need some laws, ASAP, prohibiting data for being scraped for specific reasons.

I don't think there's anything about scraping that makes this disgusting. It would be equally bad if individual people uploaded compromising photos of their exes.

The issue here is that people need control — not ownership — over their image and personal data/information. (The difference I intend to draw between control and ownership, is that the legal notion of control would be written in such a way that the fine print is irrelevant. Most online systems have some fine print somewhere giving the site owner certain rights over your content. Such fine print about a person's image needs to be rendered such a risk that if a business owner suggests including something like that to a lawyer, the lawyer starts quivering in their boots. "If I include such a clause, I will never get paid, because within half a nanosecond of it being visible you will be sued into kingdom come and your great grandchildren will still be paying off your debts."

[sopooneo]

I think I get the tech side of this and how creepy it is to be caught that way. But what is nefarious or needs to be secret about a "happy hour"? Isn't that just a promotional event for bars/restaurants where discount food/drink sales for some period?

Edit: Maybe I get it. It seems certain states have made it illegal to run "happy hours", presumably because people drink too much and behave badly. https://spoonuniversity.com/place/why-did-these-8-states-mak...

[SllX]

Even if it’s not illegal in that State, it’s also possible that the insurer deemed it to be a higher risk and would have just charged a higher premium.

If the bar owner didn’t want to pay that higher premium but did want to run a happy hour at his bar, and told the insurance company that he didn’t have happy hours at his bar, then well, he lied to the insurance company. They could have found out another way, by sending a mook down the way, but this saved labor and expense claims, and maybe even on their own insurance bills if something happened to the mook in the bar during the happy hour.

By the way, just pointing out another hypothetical here; we don’t have sufficient information to be making judgement calls on that specific situation.

[extra88]

In some places, like Massachusetts, happy hours (happys hour?) are illegal, I think the on the theory that they promote binge drinking.

[yebyen]

God forbid people are happy for an hour, we've got to raise their insurance premiums. You know in Indiana, it's actually not even legal to have any happy hour promotions wherein the drinks are cheaper but only during a certain window. If you want to make people happy with drink specials, you have to offer them the same drink special all day long. (And so that's how we do...)

Happy hour here is just when you can get a $2 cheeseburger, or $0.50 wings on special. I had never even considered something like a happy hour being reflected on your insurance premium.

[refulgentis]

I don't think it's freaky at all, I do find it freaky that there's people who will choose fraud over code as soon as code was anywhere in the loop that caught the fraud.

[gjsman-1000]

Yes - because where does it end? China, which has surveillance on anything and everything? I don't want to live in a society where everything is monitored by people I don't know and haven't heard of secretly, and neither I think do you.

Remember, this wasn't the insurance company that was spying. This was a data broker whom you've never heard of, who scrapes social media pages, and gets paid by insurance companies for reports. A bounty hunter using computers and scraping. That's dystopian.

[refulgentis]

Customers using their speech to praise your business, in the process revealing you committed fraud, and the insurance company hearing the customers, is not "China".

If all this speech was in a central repository by government mandate, I agree it's China

[gjsman-1000]

It's more that I don't think it's the damn business of any private, nameless entity to scrape my social media posts and collect them in a secret database. I signed up for _Facebook_ and their privacy policy, not for anonymous people who can affect me in the real world without due process to save all of my posts and harvest information about me from them. And then link it to all of my profiles from LinkedIn and elsewhere across the internet into one central database they can sell people and my insurance company, because make no mistake that's what they do.

[vagrantJin]

> Yes - because where does it end? China, which has surveillance on anything and everything?

The anti-Chinese rhetoric on HN is starting to grate.

You don't live in the DPRC. How do you know what China does with surveillance if any?

[alasdair_]

> You don't live in the DPRC. How do you know what China does with surveillance if any?

The same way we know what happened with the SS or the Stazi - lots of detailed evidence, first hand accounts, reports from other intelligence agencies etc.

[vagrantJin]

The thing is, the people you mention have a bone to pick. Its like taking edward snowdens view of America over say...cardi b

[avz]

I am concerned that the type of defense of privacy exemplified by your argument (that reporting the happy hour to the insurance company was a privacy violation and should be illegal) will backfire sooner or later.

Assuming that the guy was running a happy hour in a place where they are banned, your argument reinforces the view that privacy is only needed for those who break the law.

Explaining why privacy is important is hard enough as it is. Please don't make it harder.

[stickfigure]

> running a happy hour secretly in his insured bar

Can you explain what this means and why it is a problem? --Confused

[grawprog]

Not OP, but a happy hour is usually a period of time when bars serve discounted drinks and such.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_hour

It's illegal in several States. It was only made legal here a couple of years ago.

>The reason for each ban varies, but include: to prevent drunk driving, avoid the nuisance to neighbors from loud crowds and public drunkenness, and to discourage unhealthy consumption of a large amount of alcohol in a short time.

[stickfigure]

I did not realize happy hours were so contentious. Call it the California bubble.

[grawprog]

Yeah, it was a big deal when they made it legal here. Bars, restaurants everywhere started doing them like immediately. Now it's rare to find a place that doesn't offer some kind of happy hour special.

Gotta say, I haven't really noticed any of the problems occuring that the wiki article mentions was the reasoning behind most bans myself. Haven't seen any news reports about those things since the laws changed either or anything.

[FireBeyond]

That's a little bit symptomatic of your biases. Laws against happy hours are far more a bible belt thing in reality than a nanny state thing (even if some of the reasons touted publicly are nanny state-ish).

[thatguy0900]

Happy hour is when drinks go on a huge discount for a set time period. You get a lot more seriously drunken people since it encourages binge drinking. I would assume that just carries a higher insurance premium to have one.

[Ueland]

[deleted, wrong post]

[dewey]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2019/09/10/linke...

[effingwewt]

Thank you for having the fortitude to put your money where your morals are. It's one thing to turn something down, it's another entirely to give up money already earned and the prospect of more to come.

So, Thank you, for truly leading by example.

[sloshnmosh]

Scraping for bikini pics?

Reminds me of this lawsuit against Facebook:

https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-six4three-bikini-app-la...

[jacquesm]

Props to you.

[fidesomnes]

I am trying to find the unethical part of this, care to enlighten us?

[thehappypm]

Grabbing images of women from social media, and aggregating them without their consent, is not necessarily illegal, but it's certainly exploitative and creepy.

[wutbrodo]

This is just restating the question. "Exploitative and creepy" doesn't have a whole lot of semantic content beyond "wrong".

I took a whack at articulating _why_ it's wrong while not quite fitting a clear definition of malfeasance here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27632365

[willcipriano]

The pictures are one thing and bad enough. Including location and links to profiles could make you a party to stalking or worse, and that is quite unethical.

[wutbrodo]

I disagree with this comment, but it's a shame (albeit an unsurprising one) that it's flagged into oblivion instead of responded to. I think the question illuminates something interesting about the incompatibilities between our pre-social-media notions of privacy and our current public posting behavior.

I don't have my beliefs on the topic clearly articulated, but I'll give it a crack. There's the argument that public information is public, and that there's no issue in aggregating it or otherwise making it more accessible, as long as the access is through legitimate means. I'm sympathetic to this and understand why people believe it, but I think it contradicts other consensus moral intuitions about privacy rights. A salient example that other HNers may be familiar with is the doxxing of Scott Alexander; any intellectually honest person familiar with the internet can tell the difference between "you can find out who he is if you do some digging" and "real name published by the NYT", despite the pathetic attempts at dismissing the possibility that doxxing him was bad (amusingly, including by people who I am 100% sure would find the bikini example to be a horrible violation). Hell, I was a reader of Scott's for years before I first came across his real name. The entire social Internet is built on security through obscurity, because opsec is hard and many people aren't constantly vigilant.

There's even precedent for these intuitions outside of the social media context. It's uncontroversially okay for someone's face to show up in your photo taken in public; once you've taken it, nobody cares if you study the guy in the background. However, aggregate and operationalize this, and it changes not just in degree, but in character: It's practically a trope in thrillers for universal CC cameras + alphabet-agency elbow grease to stitch together comprehensive tracking of an individual, and the public is rightfully a little creeped out by the thought.

The main difference here is that technology, as always, is democratizing the ability to do this, pushing the threat model from the unrealistic "NSA spends huge resources to track you" to the prosaic "facial recognition can just track and store everyone's movements at low cost" (or "some under-the-radar shop is aggregating your bikini shots") and a million other mundane violations of our moral intuitions. To my mind, we're in the uncomfortable period before a new norm equilibrium is reached that matches the technological context. This has already happened locally: I'm sure this group knows people who have good opsec since the early 2010s, and "treat everything you post as if it's public" is at this point an age-worn piece of wisdom.

[Tainnor]

> I'm sympathetic to this and understand why people believe it, but I think it contradicts other consensus moral intuitions about privacy rights.

I mean, I guess that's the reason why it was downvoted, don't you think?

[wutbrodo]

"This is reasonable and illuminates something interesting, but I don't agree with it" is pretty widely considered a poor excuse for downvotes without comment, let alone flagging. You're obviously free to downvote whatever you want, but behaving like that is explicitly making this a meaner, dumber, less interesting place.

[Tainnor]

I should have quoted only the latter part of your sentence. I disagree that it's an illuminating comment or that the reasoning behind it is strong. And in particular, "I disagree with it" is not in the same category as "most reasonable people consider this to be immoral" (you can question whether we have the same definition for "reasonable", but at some point you'll have to recognise that we all make some decision at some point as to what we consider reasonable or not).

That said, I didn't actually downvote it, I just gave some argument for why I think the downvote was justified.

[wutbrodo]

> in particular, "I disagree with it" is not in the same category as "most reasonable people consider this to be immoral"

IMO, this distinction is usually illusory, and only taken seriously in the kinds of conversational spaces that aren't worth being part of. "Most reasonable people think it's immoral" can be applied to any number of horrific things over the course of human history. If you want to hide[1] a potentially sincere groupthink simply because it doesn't comport with groupthink, there a million and one fora full of dumb, narrow-minded people you can do that on. HN isn't all the way there yet, and I think it's worth pushing back against the tide.

This doesn't suggest that it's impossible to post something so alien that there's likely little of value to discuss, but this is demonstrably untrue of the parent comment, as evidenced by my response to it and the half dozen people who found it interesting enough to upvote it.

[1] Again, we're talking about flagging, not just downvoting, though it applies weakly to the latter too.

[ehutch79]

You might actually want to get a psych eval if you can't figure out how that's unethical.

This is not sarcasm, or me trying to be mean.

[knodi123]

> or me trying to be mean

If you have to say "I'm not trying to be mean" before anyone accuses you of it, then you're clearly aware that what you're saying sounds mean, but you don't care to try and avoid it, but you want to pretend you are still nice. Which, ironically, is something that would cause some intensive pencil scritching during a psych eval.