Re:Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of soci...
by AlexandrB on Thursday June 15, 2017 @09:21AM
(#14560101)
> Why does everything Facebook do have to be so heavily criticized?
Personally I find it offensive that an ad network thinks it has anything to say to me about the safety of my loved ones or that it has pretensions to providing services for the "public good".
If you're going to sell ads, sell ads. Don't pretend that you're not in the psychological manipulation business and you're somehow saving the world.
> After years in the industry, 95% of things that are "bad" that come out of big companies end up being well meaning and just look malicious without context. Hanlon's razor is real.
Intentions don't matter. The negative effects of pervasive corporate surveillance and finely targeted advertising are real and potentially catastrophic. Being "well meaning" just means that the engineers either didn't fully consider the consequences of their actions or acted with enough hubris to think they knew the consequences even though there were many unknowns.
The cost reductions that removed hardware interlocks for the Therac-25[1] were well-meaning. Still killed people.
Personally I find it offensive that an ad network thinks it has anything to say to me about the safety of my loved ones or that it has pretensions to providing services for the "public good".
If you're going to sell ads, sell ads. Don't pretend that you're not in the psychological manipulation business and you're somehow saving the world.
> After years in the industry, 95% of things that are "bad" that come out of big companies end up being well meaning and just look malicious without context. Hanlon's razor is real.
Intentions don't matter. The negative effects of pervasive corporate surveillance and finely targeted advertising are real and potentially catastrophic. Being "well meaning" just means that the engineers either didn't fully consider the consequences of their actions or acted with enough hubris to think they knew the consequences even though there were many unknowns.
The cost reductions that removed hardware interlocks for the Therac-25[1] were well-meaning. Still killed people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25