Still nowhere as egregious as his shady attempt to buy out native land in Hawaii through proxy lawsuits: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/17/mark-zuckerb...

Hawaiian land ownership is a fragmented mess and this is not at all unusual. I hate fb as much as the next guy but this was not shady.

Tell that to the Hawaiians who are suing

Being an apologist for a system that forces people to endure a fragmented mess is very shady, and very unusual.

“Zuckerberg reportedly took action after he learned that a developer wanted to purchase one of his neighbor's homes and use the fact that Zuckerberg lived close by as a marketing tactic. ... Zuckerberg will lease the four homes he just bought back to its current residents.”

Not sure how this paints Zuckerberg in a bad light. The bad guy seems to be the developer who was going to use his fame to advertise, thus exposing Zuckerberg to way less privacy than a normal person. This was Zuckerberg’s way to eke out a bit more privacy in the vein of a normal human. I mean he left the people in their homes.

>"I mean he left the people in their homes."

This sounds more akin to a discussion about Oligarchs after the collapse of the Soviet Union than a discussion about an American CEO in California.

Kind of eerie, even if you didn't intend it to sound that way.

Not really just kind of proves the point he didn't want people selling houses near him as. " buy now to live next to the. CEO of Facebook" that sounds like a HUGE safety problem for him AND his family.

The realtor being a creep still doesn’t change the fact that the guy who says you have no privacy, wanted more privacy.

Rich people have existed before today, you know, and yet they didn't do such things.

> sounds like a HUGE safety problem for him AND his family.

You watch too many action movies. No one's going to spend the months of background checks and negotiation and tens of millions of dollars it would take to buy a mansion next to Zuckerthing's just to kidnap him or something.

The threat to rich people are from career criminals, not other rich people.

Yeah Zuckerberg is now Boris Berezovsky amirite

Maybe I should have said he sounded like a feudal lord, it doesn't matter to me. I wasn't diving into the circumstances, just the phrasing of that last sentence I quoted.

So the transfer of state-owned assets to oligarchs is the significantly comparable as buying four houses and renting them to their owners? Do you even know what happened after the fall of the Soviet Union?

Man, you're reading too far into my comment. I was just saying the sentence reads like:

A wealthy individual (WI) coming to his neighbors.

WI: "I'm worried your homes might be bought by individuals that affect my privacy, I know you don't intend to move, so let's make a deal that you can still live here and pay rent."

Neighbors: "Ok"

Random YC Comment: "(WI) left them in their homes, rather than reneging on his deal and casting them out of their familial homes to the street."

----

A Feudal Lord (FL) dies and his heir receives the fiefdom.

FL: "You are now my serfs and I've decided you may continue to live here and pay me a percentage of the crop yield, I am a generous lord."

Serf: "OK, m'lord"

Random YC Comment: "(FL) left the peasants in their huts like the generous lord he is."

---

A state industry has been privatized and is now owned by an Oligarch, to include the housing provided to the workers.

Oligarch: "Party land now my land, you may continue to live and work here to provide me profit, I am a generous businessman."

Worker: "ХОРОШО"

Random YC Comment: "The Oligarch left the workers in their housing, as long as it still provided him a profit."

In this case a capitalist put in an offer to purchase homes, the owners accepted the offer. They didn't risk being "cast out."

They were offered a lease agreement, and they accepted this offer. They were not "left" there.

Some people sold themselves into slavery, i.e. became slaves willingly, and were bought by a capitalist.

The idea that capitalism guarantees liberty is dangerous and absurd.

They didn't risk being "cast out," they were not "left" there.

I mean this non-rhetorically: are you joking?

> I mean this non-rhetorically [sic]: are you joking?

You think that I'm joking about Zuckerberg being a poor comparison to those specific oligarchs?

I mean this unrhetorically, what part of my comment could you possibly misinterpret so horribly?

Serfs were not paid for their homes, and in many cases were not allowed to stay in their homes. How does this resemble feudalism?

He literally owns the property of his neighbors in order to make his living situation more comfortable. It's sort of like a king granting lands to lords he approves of.

Also, what's to stop him from kicking those people out if he changes his mind? I doubt Zuck would ever write a honest contract that held him accountable for anything.

Like everything else is a free economy, it was a consensual transaction. If Zuck offered me $1 mil for my small apartment, and said I could live in it, I'd take the deal. He purchased their homes and then leased them back to them, what's the problem here other than how it can be construed to "sound bad"?

That's how America works. It is a feudal system where the rich buy the laws, gated communities, college admissions, genes, designer babies, and pandemic vaccines they want.

> like a king granting lands to lords

He purchased the homes in a free market, they were not granted to him; the residents are not serfs.

So I guess it's like feudalism in that...there's a landlord?

Slaves, serfs and human organs were sold on free market in times of feudalism. They are perfectly compatiable.

Interesting aside. Back on topic: the homes were not granted to Zuckerberg; and his residents are not serfs. So they are not "perfectly comparable," they are barely comparable.

(not to mention serfs could not be bought alone, they could be sold with the land. Maybe you are thinking of slaves?)

> after he learned that a developer wanted to purchase one of his neighbor's homes and use the fact that Zuckerberg lived close by as a marketing tactic

That's just... creepy from the developer.

Also how is living next to Mark Zuckerberg a perk? Unless you want to build an illegally zoned Startup Incubator focused on IoT and the main acquirer you're targeting happens to live next door and notices your product everyday...

none of the former neighbors live there anymore, the leasing arrangement was to provide time for them to find new places to move to

finding the homes of the rich and famous is absolutely trivial.

>I mean he left the people in their homes.

how good of him . /s

Generally if someone does something you don't like you ask them to stop; if they don't you sue them , or if conditions allow you ask law enforcement to step in.

>This was Zuckerberg’s way to eke out a bit more privacy in the vein of a normal human.

on what planet do normal humans buy all the surrounding real estate in some of the most expensive places to live to 'eke out a bit more privacy'?

This is quite clearly a show of finance and power that few 'normal human' people would ever be able to demonstrate themselves.

Good on him, i'm not upset about it, he SHOULD spend his money how he wants -- i'm upset that people try to paint the behavior as normal and run-of-the-mill.

There is nothing normal/every-man/run-of-the-mill about Mark Zuckerberg's existence.

You know actually there are additional benefits and privileges of this.

In tax-exempt organizations or any organization with "self-dealing" prohibitions, you can still get any benefit you want with asset prices.

So for example, your own private foundation can own all the houses around yours (and be rented if so desired) and be sold strategically to give newer indications of market value for your own house. Sell them all at once and you may be cratering market values for your personal property, or you may be raising the property value, but as long as the funds come from the market and you don't have a self-dealing prohibition. Your personally held property being eligible for contribution to that foundation too (or other tax exempt organization type that you might not have any control over), with its current value being a consideration. Although Zuckerberg famously has an LLC that is not tax-exempt for their philanthropic missions, it doesn't mean he/they don't have any tax-exempt organizations, and they're definitely not precluded from forming or using one in the future and transferring those assets when convenient.

Yes, you also have the privilege of aiming to get more privacy.

Latching on to any one thing just reveals how little privilege you have in comparison. Many other people wouldn't talk about it, as they employ similar strategies.

I don’t see how it is hypocritical. Privacy is not a norm, it is a privilege of people like Zuckerberg.

This is precisely it. Mark is saying that privacy isn't the norm. Similar to how being a billionaire isn't the norm.

However when you have enough money you can afford such privileges.

Zuckerberg, the man who made his billions destroying privacy for the rest of us.

To be fair, a billionaire hardly has to worry about social NORMs

because 1 is not an opinion but a fact. and probably a fact he probably disagree with, like you

people don't care about privacy but it's not exactly his fault. then his job is to capitalize on it. why would he care. you would probably do the same ..

Ask people for unfettered access to their unlocked phone, even with them sitting there and watching you to prevent you from doing anything but poke around, and you will find a whole lot of people suddenly care more about privacy.

What is probably closer to the truth is that people care little about privacy from someone they think they will never come face to face with, and who they believe won't leak that information to anyone they will come face to face with.

The problem comes when people don't have the knowledge necessary to assess the risk of that happening in any given scenario.

I would definitely not do the same and its not a fact. Plenty of people value their privacy they are just not as tech savvy and not aware that they are giving it up.

> people don't care about privacy

Funny you phrase it like that. When I discuss with people about 'privacy', nobody has anything to hide. When I take 2-3 minutes explaining to them why 'someone' (data markets) out there knows: what type of porn gets them off, what they shop, how much money they have, what diseases they have (that may impact their chances to a life insurance - theirs' and their kids'), their drinking habits (that may impact their premiums on car insurance), who they meet/greet/f..k..

Then their expression changes a bit. Ignorance is bliss. I awaken 1-2 people at a time. BUT (big but - sorry for the caps) "all my friends is on FB, and Chrome is such a nice browser".

> you would probably do the same

I used to know a guy who geniunely had the opinion: if it wasn't illegal to sell heroin to kids, I'd be a billionaire right now selling to all my kids, starting with my kids' friends.

Unfortunately this person has kids, voting rights, walks among us. Yes I want to be a billionaire (I'm many-many zeros away from this target). No I wouldn't sell heroin (or your kids' photos you post on social media) to anyone else. Zuck has no problem getting 13yo on Instagram, profiling them, and trading their data. So NO.

But its not the privacy itself that people care about.

The reason is people care is because this information can be used to harm them.

The reason I care about my credit card number being public is because it can be used to stole my money but If my credit card number can be public while still keeping my money belong to me then I would much prefer that.

The better way would be to make everything as public as much as possible then fixes the issue that arise due to that information being public.

I think this is an important point to make. I think most people, myself included, are fine with sharing personal information if the person i'm sharing it with isn't going to use it against me. That's always been the case dealing with people.

I think that it is clear than then you post on Facebook about my/your/someone's cancer treatment, data aggregators will mark this in your medical records. An insurer 20-30 years from now will easily correlate that my/you/someone's kid has me/you/etc as a father, and therefore have increased chances of cancer (or some other disease) and thus affect their chance to get life insurance or affect the price of premiums.

When you share with FB (imho) it is clear that you don't share with a person, but with a hungry-for-information beast. Didn't people hear about Cambridge Analytica? Is anyone so naive so as to believe that this was 'the end of information leakage' by FB? (or other similar platforms, such as Pinterest - in the case someone makes a "medicine for my X disease" table).

>and thus affect their chance to get life insurance or affect the price of premiums

So the real issue is can't get insurance/too expensive insurance, not the privacy itself.

If this is fixed then I don't care if the information being public.

It's definitely not a fact, but rather an argument.

Non-technical people within my circle appreciate GDPR. They fall into recent Apple's privacy advertising, FWIW. Many of my non-IT business peers have moved to private email services long ago — e.g. Protonmail, Mailbox.org, Fastmail, etc. — regardless of Google's Eric Schmidt[1] anti-privacy stance back in the day. Almost everyone I constantly communicate with use Telegram, and privacy of comms (FWIW) was among selling points at the time of switching the IM.

I won't exaggerate the value of privacy for a general public. But since Snowden's publications, Cambridge Analytica scandal and GDPR discussion with a widespread media coverage, common citizens became much more privacy-concerned, at least in Europe.

Below I quote highlights from the recent FRA (EU Agency for Fundamental Rights) survey report "Your rights matter: Data protection and privacy - Fundamental Rights Survey", June 2020[2]:

> 41% do not want to share any personal data with private companies, almost double the number compared to public bodies;

> the type of personal data influences people’s willingness to share. Only around 5% want to share their facial images or fingerprints with private companies;

> 72% know the privacy settings on their smart phones. But 24% do not know how to check the privacy settings on their apps;

> 55% fear criminals or fraudsters accessing their personal data. Around 30% worry about advertisers, businesses and foreign governments’ access to information without them knowing;

> 33% do not read the terms and conditions when using online services compared with 22% who always read them;

> 69% know about the GDPR. A similar number know their national data protection supervisory authority (71%);

> only 51% are aware that they can access their personal data held by companies.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...

[2] https://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra_uploads/fra-20... (PDF)

Regarding your second point, I think it's more that people don't care as much about privacy if the consequences seem to be low/nonexistent, and they weigh their interest in platforms like Instagram, TikTok, etc. more highly than the potential negative impacts of their privacy being violated. I know users of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Slack, etc. who will almost definitely never move to encrypted email because they like the platform and the community. Folks on HN and in the tech sector in general can have quite different experiences with those in the world at-large, and one's viewpoint on this will differ based on who's in your networks. I think it's likely if you walk down the street in Manhattan or LA and ask someone if they know what DRM, copyleft, or GDPR is, the answer will be no. But they will care if the music they have can't be copied/shared, they'll know Wikipedia, and they'll care if their information with Google can't be deleted or is sold to other companies.

Maybe he bought the surrounding houses to make it harder for snipers? He's not exactly a popular guy, and there are a lot of guns in America.

Why do you feel the need to make up totally absurd excuses to protect his image?

Do you know him personally or has he done something for you? Why do you believe he is a person of integrity?

> Why do you feel the need to make up totally absurd excuses to protect his image?

You Americans really have no sense of humour sometimes. Anyway, how exactly is it protecting his image to imply people might want to shoot him? Being widely disliked enough to drive people to that isn't exactly a sign of shining character. It's one of the few things the left and right in American can unite on: hating the zucc.

I think curent zeitgwist is that you can't tell if someone is trolling or is bonkers! Otherwise,-I appreciate it.

Never been to US myself, but fair enough.

That would make perfect sense, since public figures mostly get assassinated at their homes.

He will be simply replaced with Mk 2.