jnky

All contributors to open source are not created equal. It is different when a literal 3 trillion dollar company does it, thus demonstrating they were unworthy of the trust and goodwill put in them. They have the money, they have the cloud infrastructure, they are doing all kinds of scraping themselves.

Well it obviously mattered enough for the Founding Fathers of the US to enshrine freedom of speech in the Bill of Rights, and in the last 200-ish years it also mattered enough for US courts not to overturn or politicians of various parties to change it.

Now where I'm from (Germany), not just "hate speech" is against the law, but it's also unlawful to insult another person. It's complicated, but for the latter it's mostly sufficient that they feel insulted by what you said to them personally.

Now while I don't go around insulting people in person or on the Internet, I personally think - for instance - that it should be allowed to call a person an asshole, if they behave like an asshole. Yet, if I did that here, or even online to another German person, they could go to the police and press charges. If the public prosecutor is sufficiently bored, this very low barrier could also be used to dox me in an otherwise reasonably anonymous setting, since the resulting lawsuit could result in my data getting subpoenaed from, say, Twitter and my ISP. This has happened to other people here in the past.

Now while I'm neither in favor of either hate speech nor randomly and viciously insulting people online, I consider the law in Germany as outlined unreasonable in an online setting. I think freedom of speech is more important fundamentally than another person's right to not feel hurt, or for some powers that be to silence or punish me because I said something inconvenient that they merely claim to meet some of the criteria for speech that is restricted here.

Mind you, this is the case all the while freedom of speech is enshrined in the German constitution as well. But I think it is a pretty good example of why I think freedom of speech should not be curtailed just in the name of another person's feelings about said speech. Even if a person, as you do, doesn't see a direct and tangible benefit in allowing that kind of speech, I would argue that a larger fraction of people are against disallowing it, because of the indirect consequences and where that line of lawmaking leads.

Another thing to consider is this: Say you're modestly happy with the current government wherever you live, and you'd be happy for them to have an "easy" way to curtail freedom of speech. Would you also be happy for the opposing political side to do the same thing? What if some extremists came to power?

This kind of reasoning is why free speech absolutists are so staunchly defending freedom of speech, even if it may be inconvenient or insulting to themselves or others.

> Please help me understand what the difference is between, say, platforming racist harassment because of a "political commitment to free speech" and platforming racist harassment because you just kinda like racist harassment?

The difference is intent. Intent matters. Intent is the difference between murder and manslaughter, or between a conspiracy and mere speech.

I disagree that the "Do-Not-Track header is a perfect solution to this", because it implies that the default (i.e. the header being absent) should allow sites to track you. I (and apparently EU legislators) think opting in to privacy is wrong. You should have privacy by default. If anything, there should be a "Creepily-Track-My-Activity-Over-The-Entire-Internet" header, that, when present, allows tracking.

There also used to be another standard called "P3P" that tried to integrate privacy into browser UIs with a more or less standardized interface and that, too, failed. Among other reasons because companies wanting to track people subverted it.

I had a similar problem a while back where Google demanded a second authentication factor for an account that didn't have 2FA set. It asked for a previous password that the account must have had >10 years ago and I think the answer to a security question that I couldn't answer, because I always use cryptic responses to those and apparently didn't save this one way back when. My rationale was that I wouldn't need any of that, because I knew the account password so there would never be a need to go through account recovery.

Either way, I found a solution to that on one of those Google user support forums: I had to not try and log in to the account for approximately 40 days. After that, it'd let me log in with just the password again. This is apparently because Google keeps flagging the account of getting attacked and requiring a second authentication factor for some reason and the timer for that keeps getting reset after a failed challenge for one of the account recovery factors. After something between 30 and 40 days, I could log in to the account with just the password again.

Wouldn't Ireland be your best bet? It's close, English-speaking, culturally similar and some UK citizens are eligible for Irish citizens to boot.

People want Facebook to stop following people, especially those signed out or without an account to begin with, around the internet in a creepy way. How hard can it be really? Is it too much to ask that some company I don't have business with doesn't spy on my web surfing habits?

The announcement also reads to me as if the "clearing" doesn't even do what people may expect it to do:

> Once we roll out this update, you'll be able to see information about the apps and websites you've interacted with, and you'll be able to clear this information from your account.

This sounds to me as if they still keep the information and just don't associate it with your account anymore.

I don't know how precise the ad targeting exactly, but what if you narrow the base group down to your 19 fake accounts and your target user.

If you could the further filter your ad based on gender (as mentioned above), personal interests or other private data, you may be able to use your ad impressions to figure out things about an unsuspecting person.

I'd consider that a huge breach of my privacy.

Or you can download an emulator and a rar with all 721 SNES games for free.

> I assume that you think that Amazon would be clearing parts of the African Serengeti and protecting it's racks from lions, wildebeest and tribesmen.

And I assume you think of me as some kind of idiot. Of course I understand that Kenya is not as you just said, but I consider Kenya an underdeveloped country that does not have its act together. I really don't see how you can argue against that based on facts.