Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by johnny_b_g 1616 days ago
Exactly.

I'm not a Facebook user, mostly because of the vast and repeated privacy violations they've committed in the past (not to mention their monopoly behaviors and political influencing, etc.) - but because I don't run/own/fund any similar monopolistic entity, I'm essentially forbidden from even talking about it??

Another is ClearView AI (oh look, another Thiel-funded thing!) - I oppose the existence of that company based on their entire business model being the abuse of people's information without consent, and how they expect you to cancel yourself to prevent being abused by them [1]. But according to some people [2], anyone that hasn't been abusing people's privacy cannot have an opinion on ClearView AI's actions [3], until you actually do so yourself [4], otherwise you're just "posturing" [4][5].

Yeah, great logic!

> They worship them, to put it simply - the rich and powerful - and they don't understand & can't process that not everyone else does.

What's worse are the ones that go out of their way to justify or even apologize their behavior (not unlike those part of a certain political cult right now).

[1] https://app.clearview.ai/privacy/deindex

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Kranar

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29858726

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29858764

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29858663

1 comments

Yeah, it's an absurd claim. And of course it never applies to their own hagiographic opinions of these people and these companies - it only invalidates critics. Handy! Who wants to be the one to tell the Holocaust historians?

And yeah, ClearView is absolutely typical. I'm not going to genuflect to some seasteading-obsessed professed libertarian whose entire business career, practically, has been in the realm of surveillance companies targeted at the bloated and despotic American state. Not even if you wrap it in some cod-philosophy blog post that namedrops Bayesian probability and game theory and Taleb.