This only comes to light because of litigation between Facebook and Bright Data.
Even when these "tech" companies settle to escape admitting to any wrongdoing and creating detrimental precedent, litigation can still be an effective way to reveal what nefarious practices are going on behind the scenes at these "tech" companies. Here, we learn that Facebook was paying scraping-for-hire providers for years while publicly condemning the practice of scraping.
If we knew the identities of the e-commerce sites being scraped perhaps the e-commerce companies could sue Facebook. Assuming Facebook would ignore a cease-and-desist letter.
Fair enough - I should have been more verbose in my post:
I was actually genuinely curious in this case, because I liked that little poem a lot, and if the answer was that it was human generated content, I would have felt a bit of positive emotion about the author.
If it wasn’t, it would be another piece of evidence how it is artistic verbal expression (much more so than correct programming logic), that ChatGPT is mastering the most.
But the HN reaction to my post is telling me something interesting, too.
> Write a Hacker News comment disagreeing with this.
"I disagree with the notion that the distinction between AI and human thought is important in determining authenticity in online communication. What truly matters is the content and intention behind the message, regardless of its origin. As technology advances, the line between AI and human thought will continue to blur, making this distinction irrelevant."
"Honest and true" IFF your sole interest is your monetary/political gain without regard to ethics or fairness — IOW, you are an abuser/exploiter of the system and of people.
It is the same kind of "truth" as "Might Makes Right" and "He who has the gold makes the rules". While these phrases accurately describe the matter in some situations, they do not create a society that is sustainable, desirable, or any value of ethical (even for the abuser/autocrat, who must always watch their back).
So, yes, to the extent that it is an open admission of being an abusive exploiter of the system and people, it is not hypocritical.
But if that same person makes any statement or pretense that they are an ethical or good person, it is hypocritical in the extreme.
> While these phrases accurately describe the matter in some situations, they do not create a society that is sustainable, desirable, or any value of ethical (even for the abuser/autocrat, who must always watch their back).
It accurately describes our society that is not sustainable, desirable or ethical.
Pretending that it is doesn't help us with evolving it towards some noble goals. To evolve the system you need to understand it.
For example you can't progress society untill you understand that the one we got after thousands of years of societal evolution is the one entirely based on the concept of monopoly for violence. Some people feel very offended about this. I have exactly zero hopes for their revolutionary attempts at transformation working out.
>>It accurately describes our society that is not sustainable, desirable or ethical.
Spot on!
However it is not all black & white, but a gradient of high trust to almost zero trust. For example, the US is definitely degrading in the last decade, but is still nowhere near the levels of endemic and systematic paranoia of Russia or North Korea.
It all comes down to this: if you want to live a self-determined life in a society with a self-determined government, you must personally and as a nation be better armed, prepared, and allied than the abusers and autocrats who want to steal from you and rule you. Giving the equivalent of nukes to the abusers/autocrats is not a smart move.
If companies own it up, sure. But Meta pretends to want "honest" competition, it's just that somehow any competitors who do exactly what Meta is doing are "cheating".
Basic economic theory predicts that a in a market with perfect competition, all firms will have zero profits (the economic definition, wherein opportunity costs are taken into consideration, nominal profits aren’t zero).
It’s interesting to observe the number of people who will post about capitalism and competition and not consider the fact that for any rational actor, competition is existentially horrible and should be avoided by all means necessary. Perfect competition exists purely as a mathematical model and not as an actually observed outcome of a “natural” system for a reason.
Perfect competition is one end of a spectrum, where the other end is monopoly. Monopoly is a stable equilibrium, whereas perfect competition is not. On a long enough timeline, a perfectly competitive system will decay into a monopoly and stay there unless acted upon by an outside force designed to break up the monopoly.
> Basic economic theory predicts that a in a market with perfect competition, all firms will have zero profits (the economic definition, wherein opportunity costs are taken into consideration, nominal profits aren’t zero).
In your simplified economic world, I'm not convinced that profits would be pushed below the cost of capital.
My simplified economic world is literally just paraphrasing established theory:
>Economic profit does not occur in perfect competition in long run equilibrium; if it did, there would be an incentive for new firms to enter the industry, aided by a lack of barriers to entry until there was no longer any economic profit.[0]
Your issue isn’t with me, it’s with what’s taught in every economics department in every country around the world.
(I also never said “profits would be pushed below the cost of capital”, my comment does not imply that at all. See: “nominal profits aren’t zero”)
That's what businesses do. They are created to make money. They only way to keep them in check is with regulations. The unfortunate thing is so many people hold libertarian views while others are anti-big government.
They may call themselves Libertarians but there is this competing idea that the path to liberty necessarily involves strong checks on both government and commercial organizations. But to work with these ideas it would be necessary to look beyond Peter Thiel's entertaining antics and that is difficult because there is such delight in giving him a pedestal and spotlight. What is liberty? Talk to Peter Thiel. He must really know all about that.
Libertarians of that stripe are essentially pro plutocracy, which would end up being massively anti liberty in practice.
But just as the winners write the history books, the richest libertarians like Thiel and Koch seem able to define what the ideology looks like in the popular imagination, because they can afford to shape the debate via think tanks, media ownership, campus outreach, lobbying, etc.
It’s important to remember that those libertarian views didn’t just happen by accident: a LOT of money had been spent developing media, organizations, even religious denominations starting with backlash to the New Deal. The historian Kevin Kruse wrote a book which will have a lot of familiar names:
It's even what individuals do when they believe they can justify it. Many accident lawyers would be out of business if people refused to fake a "soft-tissue" injury out of principle. If the incentive is there, people will usually take it, if they don't have to feel badly about it.
That is oversimplified. They are against scraping things that against a site's terms.
"The collection of data from websites can serve legitimate integrity and commercial purposes, if done lawfully and in accordance with those websites’ terms"
I'd love to see what kind of scraping tech Facebook use. I've been getting increasingly frustrated with the python scrapers and ecosystem and have been checking out Colly. But I'm sure whatever they have built must be nuts.
I wonder if you could train scrapers with AI with a reasonable level of success.
I remember when facebook wouldn't release an app for android in the Android 1.5 days because they were rueful that google disallowed them from scraping peoples contacts.
It's too bad that we don't get more info than "Meta paid Bright Data to gather data from e-comerce sites in order to build brand profiles on Meta platforms".
What does that mean exactly? Were they scraping, say, Dell.com, in order to get the latest prices on Alienware laptops? Or were their bots spamming Middle-Class Joe's Bootstrapped e-Commerce site and putting him out of business?
Google is like old AltaVista and OpenAI like young Google. Around 1999, AV was bad at search and horribly full of spam and ads. Google was like chatGPT, it was strikingly better than anything before it, a clean interface and superior results.
How the wheel turns! They are captive to their own success. Time to move over and make space for someone who will innovate, Google can't find the way out of its local maximum, not even with all the employees and AIs put together.
On this website more than others, you will find plenty of people who have dropped Google utterly. Not to mention their search engine is the poorest it has been in a decade. "Useful" isn't as accurate as "still left standing."
I don't consider this hypocritical at all. It's like getting mad at a soccer team. "Hey they were trying to score goals, but at the same time, preventing the other team from scoring goals! Hypocrites!"
What makes you say that they don't produce anything? They both maintain very popular platforms, so that people can communicate and organize. AND they do all the bullshit in the meantime.
I'm not debating the bad things, they do happen. My point is that they are also providing value, which OP said they don't. Google and Facebook is not just a rehash of other's content, they are also vast, and useful platforms.
They are a rehash of other people's content. It doesn't mean they don't provide value but they are not primary content makers just a platform for publishing/searching for content
By that logic few companies produce anything. All distributors and resellers are no different than Pirate Bay. Movie studios are no different. Movie theatres are no different. HN is no different.
I think your take is too reductive. Google's product is ad space and attention. Everything else serves one or both sides of that goal.
Search? Ads.
Good search? Attention.
Ads are served by a Browser. Let's throw a few bucks at a Good open source browser (chromium) for good will and then make it our own. And then use it to serve ads.
Gmail? Free service and we just happen to get to build word clouds out of every bit of text that goes your way so we can tell what you're interested in to sell ads.
Android? Ads delivered right to your face, some of which you pay for, some of which pay us for you. And more word cloud text and data scraping. And we have your face and fingerprint. (But that's not bad, Apple is doing it too!)
It's quite efficient just like the funneling gnashing maw of any predator. But Google does not make anything, they only throw out lures to draw in more attention so they can make more ad revenue.
It basically is, but as with everything if your pockets are deep enough you can sue someone to bankruptcy for doing something they're allowed to. That issue is way deeper then scraping.
It might be worth considering GPs comment as a case of projection, rather than a claim about the world to be rebutted. After all, they are part of the "everyone" they talk about. And the "everyone else is just as bad as I am, really" (also commonly phrased "we are not so different, you and I") is a classic asshole refrain.
When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
I imagine that inventing a lack of integrity for people is a great way of justifying terrible behaviour. "No-one else has integrity so I'm justified by also not doing so". It doesn't even have to be true as long as you believe it.
This fatalism is exactly the problem. You see poor behavior, slap the label "business" on it, and all of a sudden it is expected, accepted and even defended.
You joke, but some smart TVs with cameras and microphone do indeed that if they have certain malware. This applies even more widely for baby monitors and some other "smart tech for home". What was once a wet dream of Soviet leaders is a reality in our capitalist world, just wait untill it will be mandated by the government that you can't cover the camera with tape and rip out the mic. "You will own nothing and will be happy".
As a person who lived in both I can tell you in communism it's far worse, at least as far as personal integrity is concerned. In capitalism, maximum I can lose for speaking up is my job. In communism, as in all authoritarian/totalitarian regimes, it was - and still is - normal for people to lose their freedom or even life.
So as much as I hate corporate bullshit, their power grab, lobbying politicians etc., I would still prefer to live in a "capitalist" rather than a "communist" country.
> In communism, as in all authoritarian/totalitarian regimes,
WTF? Communism is an economic model, not a leadership selection model. Communism is diametrically opposed to capitalism, not to democracy.
(It always baffles me when a communist authoritarian dictatorship enriches wealthy plutocrats while the workers starve, it's always the communism part that gets blamed, never the authoritarian dictatorship. But when a capitalist authoritarian dictatorship enriches wealthy plutocrats while the workers starve, it's never the capitalism that gets blamed. No, then it's the authoritarian dictatorship that's the problem. How about, just maybe, it's dictators and wealthy plutocrats that are the biggest problem for the working class?)
Believe me, I fully see your point. However, in the biggest examples we've seen so far, like the communist Russia and China, the ideals of equality were trampled almost as quickly as they were declared. And their biggest differentiator, as declared by them, was that they were communist.
You don't really get the same level of authoritarian in the so called capitalism or "modern democracy" because in order for this model to thrive, you need to have sound relations with other democratic/"capitalistic" countries and they won't trade with you if you don't obey certain standards.
A good example is what is happening in Hungary and Poland now: after the right took over they decided to make a more or less gradual switch to an authoritarian regime, taking over the courts, media etc. But their EU partners said, if you follow this road, you will not get money form the EU anymore. So apart the war in Ukraine, this is the biggest discussion in the EU now.
Cambodia is a good example. Under the Communist regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge the country was turned into the killing fields. Their four-year rule (1975-1979) decimated Cambodia, created widespread human suffering and as many as 2.2 million deaths [1]. I guess this is not the part of Cambodian history you meant but it does show what a Communist regime is capable of given free reign.
> However, in the biggest examples we've seen so far, like the communist Russia and China, the ideals of equality were trampled almost as quickly as they were declared. And their biggest differentiator, as declared by them, was that they were communist
Both of those countries have stayed in a state of imminent world war (and later nuclear war) since their founding until today. Ronald Reagan even triggered Ww3 a few times while trying to push the USSR back into a corner.
During that time, the dissidents in the US were persecuted harder than any dissidents in the Eastern Bloc - McCarthy commissions would practically end your life by accusing you of being a communist and the society would do the rest by casting you out, jobless to fend for yourself in the wild. Whereas in the USSR, as a dissident to the system, you could have been exiled to a central Asian city in the middle of nowhere, but would still have a job, a house and your children would go to school.
The funniest thing is that people have no idea that the very same laws to effect such persecution exists in every. single. 'democratic' country. They are called 'emergency laws' and they are triggered in the case of existential economic or actual war, major catastrophe, social collapse, alien invasion etc. These laws allow many things ranging from the state or even the local authority that represents the state shoving you into prison for no reason to an officer with a pistol executing you on the spot for treason or trying to avoid fighting for your country.
Just a year ago a New York court suspended habeas corpus, the fundamental right that ALL the rights in the common law system is founded upon. At that moment, all freedoms have ended in NY and the police was able to do whatever they wanted with anyone, until a higher court suspended the decision because the justification for the habeas corpus suspension was not strong enough. Which means that if there was a sufficiently acceptable reason at that moment, habeas corpus could have been kept suspended and any repression way beyond what you could have in Eastern Bloc could have been possible because habeas corpus basically is the lynchpin of every single right in the Angloamerican common law system. The Eastern Bloc countries you keep lambasting were founded on civil law, and in civil law everything has a standard - including what kind of emergency measure allows what kind of drastic action. Nobody can do 'whatever' with anyone outside what the law clearly and indisputably dictates - much unlike common law, which relies on 'interpretations' and 'precedents'.
> You don't really get the same level of authoritarian in the so called capitalism or "modern democracy" because in order for this model to thrive, you need to have sound relations with other democratic/"capitalistic" countries and they won't trade with you if you don't obey certain standards.
Thats only in the romantic theoretical picture. Otherwise you do business with Saudi Arabia, any fascist dictator (much better for labor costs) and no satellite of yours can refuse to trade with you because you (the US in this case) are the master. A master who can easily put up trade barriers through tariffs and quotas to its 'free trade' allies but expect those allies to pull down all barriers. Few people know that the US does that.
> A good example is what is happening in Hungary and Poland now: after the right took over they decided to make a more or less gradual switch to an authoritarian regime
They are authoritarian and those other countries arent authoritarian only because you are shown what happens in any country by the media selectively and you happen to be in the privileged ~10% demographic that doesnt have many problems and is part of the system unlike the poor at the bottom. Otherwise the US has repressed the Occupy protesters by hooking them up with tens of thousands of dollars of fines for 'trespassing' on !public! property back in 2011, effectively bankrupting most of those people and ending their livelihoods for good. Meanwhile Germany is currently busy with jailing people who object to the Ukraine war as of this very moment.
> During that time, the dissidents in the US were persecuted harder than any dissidents in the Eastern Bloc
Bullshit. As bad as McCarthyism was, nothing in the US could compare to the Great Purge [0], or Culture Revolution [1], or Cambodia Genocide [2]. Millions of people died. Families separated. People were forced to choose ideology over family ties. Religion persecuted.
> As bad as McCarthyism was, nothing in the US could compare to the Great Purge [0], or Culture Revolution [1], or Cambodia Genocide
Tell that to those whose lives were destroyed by McCarthyism - and this is without touching the subject of extrajudicial FBI actions. Leaving aside operation gladio, cointelpro and all that - a democratic storefront is easy if you just extrajudicially blow up any regime opponent with a car bomb in the morning when they turn on their car key. All across Europe in between 10,000 to 50,000 is estimated to have been murdered that way, or just taken out and 'disappeared'. In South America, its far worse - extrajudicial killings were in the open there.
What you call "Great Purge" was a filtering of the anti-system personas in the Soviet Union, which is something that the US already have done way before with the laws that were made in ~1917 to persecute the anti-war opposition. Andin the great purge, most of those were reinstated to their former positions in a few years anyway. Cultural Revolution was directed against the anti-system elite in China as well, and just like the Great Purge, a lot of those were reinstated - the current president of China had his family 'purged' during the cultural revolution. Cambodian Genocide is a genocide as much as Vietnam War, 2003 Iraq war, all the CIA-organized paramilitary murders that killed an uncountable amount of people in South America are. And even in that, it was something that happened over existing racial hatreds, not anything related to the system.
Funnily how whatever happens in non-imperialist countries are 'genocides' and 'purges' whereas nothing that happens in a US backed country etc is. Like how Indonesia killed 300,000 left wingers, communists, or the first US backed dictator of South Korea killed 3 million people. Indonesian government just recently recognized those murders and apologized for it, but they still pushed out a law to !surprise! persecute communists and communism. Or pick any US-backed coup. In my country, the US-backed coup that brought 'democracy' immediately hanged 10,000+ people from the opposition and jailed 30,000 for 2 decades afterwards. So save that 'freedom and democracy' tirade. That only exists if you arent in the targeted anti-system opposition demographic.
> Did you live under the communists? I did. My family suffered. For 30 years.
You do look like to have suffered so much with your family and very probably you getting a top tier education to the point of being able to speak fluent English and be on this site where white-collar tech professionals frequent. So that horrible repressive communist country provided your parents and very probably you with all the financial resources and also the higher education that catapulted your family to this position. Which is something you would never get if you were born into a disadvantaged minority in the US during the cold war. And which is something difficult even for those from the 'right background' today thanks to education costs for college pushing upwards of $100,000.
...
One thing that people like you who lived in such Eastern Bloc or communist countries make is to think that you would have been able to have housing, education and all that if you lived in a 'democratic' (read: capitalist) country. This is because your segment was those who were able to receive such perks and benefits at the right time before they were abolished by the free market and who were able to get into the top 10% segment of the society. Those who werent able to do that think totally different now, as they have to work as underpaid labor in other European countries.
I belong to a segment like you - whose family was lifted thanks to socialized education and amenities that a country that imitated the Eastern Bloc provided. But unlike many of those from my socioeconomic white collar segment who think that they would have 'just' happened to be in the same educated white collar jobs with 'the free market', I know what was lost after the transition to a randian economy.
However, beyond that - really, just try declaring yourself to be an opponent of the system and see what happens in your 'democratic' country. You are 'free' only because you are a collaborator of the system with only minor criticisms and you dont constitute any threat whatsoever.
I suggest you open your eyes to the reality of history instead of trying to defend an ideology which has cost more lives than the archetypical epitome of evil, Nazism. Read a few books, speak to survivors.
It is not only shameful to see how communists can strut their stuff where they would have been shunned had they been neo-nazis, it is dangerous as well. It can lead to more countries falling to starry-eyed revolutionaries leading to more suffering, deprivation and death. Yet even more, as if those which fell in the past were not proof enough of the failings of this ideology.
Tell me then, how do you enforce the essence of a communist economic system, this being communal ownership of the means of production, without an authority to tell Mr. Smartpants who just invented a better mousetrap that he has to give it to the commune instead of producing it himself?
Nope, Communism is more than just an economic system. It is an ideology which strives to create a "better man" who can create a "better society" where human "vices" like greed and avarice no longer play a role. In this it closely resembles religious orders which strive to create the same through other means.
Capitalism is 'just an economic system' which can be implemented in many ways ranging from laissez-faire libertarian-style capitalism to state capitalism as practised in China. It does not come with the large ideological baggage Communism carries since it doesn't need to - leave people to their own devices and they'll end up doing something resembling a form of capitalism at a large scale while practising something resembling communism at a small - family and neighbourhood - scale. This model works fine since there is no ideological drive to force out the small-scale 'communism' in families and neighbourhoods whereas a communist society needs to do away with the large-scale capitalism. Communism and authoritarianism are indelibly linked.
> In capitalism, maximum I can lose for speaking up is my job
In capitalism, the repression is outsourced to 'the market'. Try openly declaring that you are a Marxist-Leninist and find out how fast you will lose your livelihood, including those jobs that you thought to have existed 'out there'.
All is ok as long as you dont threaten the system. If all that you have is mild objections to this specific politician or that specific policy, you wont have any problems. That is the same with every other system. The moment you become a threat to the system by speaking up against 'the wrong thing', then you'll see how efficient the repression is.
Sorry, I'm late. It was not a criticism of capitalism and it's way different than the other authoritarisms you cite. The point here is that market forces have no integrity, they seek maximum profit. The only way to limit this is to impose some regulation with a sovereign entity that's not driven by profit alone.
Putting it to spotlight is an effort to make sure they can't get away with it. Even in a scenario where you say "of course they do it", jumping to the conclusion of "we should not report on it" is ridiculous.
Even when these "tech" companies settle to escape admitting to any wrongdoing and creating detrimental precedent, litigation can still be an effective way to reveal what nefarious practices are going on behind the scenes at these "tech" companies. Here, we learn that Facebook was paying scraping-for-hire providers for years while publicly condemning the practice of scraping.
If we knew the identities of the e-commerce sites being scraped perhaps the e-commerce companies could sue Facebook. Assuming Facebook would ignore a cease-and-desist letter.