News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:When Websites Won’t Take No for an Answer by 13of40 on Saturday May 14, 2016 @01:32PM (#11697164)
> Any fair transaction should surely balance?

I don't think that's true, because a company could have the means to do something profitably that an individual couldn't. For example, I just changed the toner cartridges on my printer, and HP provided UPS stickers so I can send the old ones back for "recycling", which is obviously just them filling them back up and selling them to someone else. Let's assume they just made $20 on the deal. That doesn't mean I'd have $20 if I'd kept them, because to me, lacking a factory to refurbish them, they're just garbage. Same goes for all of that personal information Google and Facebook make money on -- you can't go down to the pawn shop and sell your own information, because it only matters in bulk.

Re:When Websites Won’t Take No for an Answer by xg15 on Saturday May 14, 2016 @03:12PM (#11697607)
Except it's not always easy to see if you're actually harmed or not. In the toner case, the UPS sticker is also a (very gentle) nudge away from trying to refill the cartridge yourself using a cheaper service.

As for the personal information, there is an entertaining talk[1] by Pinboard's Maciej Cegłowski about how we can't even know if collected personal information will at some point come back to hurt you or not.

[1] http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm