alt Hacker NewsAre you being serious right now or just engaging in "asking questions" to suppress others thoughts? Why are these types of comments so common on this site? No obviously we aren't in fact talking about making basic code changes, but maybe if those changes are being consistently done that clearly show users getting more depressed or alienated it should be questioned more and finally regulated.
Fun fact, the last data privacy law the US passed was about video stores not sharing your rentals. Maybe it's time we start passing more, after all it's not like these companies HAVE to conduct business this way.
It's all completely arbitrary, there's no reason why social media companies can't be legally compelled to divest from all user PII and be forced to go to regulated third party companies for such information. Or force social media companies to allow export of data or forcing them to follow consistent standards so competitors can easily enter the realm and users can easily follow too.
You can go for the throat and say that social media companies can't own an advertising platform either.
Before you go all "oh no the government should help the business magnates more, not the users." I suggest you study how monopolies existed in the 19th century because they look no different than the corporate structure of any big tech company, and see how government finally regulated those bloodsuckers back then.
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> Are you being serious right now or just engaging in "asking questions" to suppress others thoughts?
I don't know why people are being overly reactive to the comment.
Research means different things to different people. For me, research means "published in academic journals". He is merely trying to get everyone on the same page before a conversation ensues.
I don’t think it is fair to criticize the person you are responding to for asking the question they did.
These types of comments are common on this site because we are actually interested in how things work in practice. We don’t like to stop at just saying “companies shouldn’t be allowed to do problematic research without approval”, we like to think about how you could ever make that idea a reality.
If we are serious about stopping problematic corporate research, we have to ask these questions. To regulate something, you have to be able to define it. What sort of research are we trying to regulate? The person you replied to gave a few examples of things that are clearly ‘research’ and probably aren’t things we would want to prevent, so if we are serious about regulating this we would need a definition that includes the bad stuff but doesn’t include the stuff we don’t want to regulate.
If we don’t ask these questions, we can never move past hand wringing.
> Are you being serious right now or just engaging in "asking questions" to suppress others thoughts?
I must be really good at asking questions if they have that kind of power. So here's another. How would we ever even know those changes were making users more depressed if the company didn't do research on them? Which they would never do if you make it a bureaucratic pain in the ass to do it.
And, no, I would much rather the companies that I explicitly create an account and interact with to be the ones holding my data rather than some shady 3rd parties.