OkCupid gave 3M dating-app photos to facial recognition firm, FTC says (opens in new tab)

Nonsense, I have it on good authority that the old internet sans LLM surveillance capitalism is still alive and well. You just stopped going there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47589055

Do most SaaS actually delete or do they just store a tombstone in the database for your account?

Well you still have account on HN.

> I have long wondered about the market size for privacy-focused apps.

The real problem is how to trust that a "privacy-focused" app is actually privacy-focused. You certainly can't take the publisher's word for it.

The only safe stance is to withhold as much personal information from as much software and services as possible.

This is a multi-axis problem.

On one spectrum, you have privacy -- at one extreme, the most private of people don't even use social apps, they are traditionally private people. At the other extreme, you have the highest consumers of apps -- the people who demand sharing the most.

On the other spectrum, you have technical acuity -- at one extreme you have people who can audit software they use and verify that it actually does what it says -- at the other extreme, you have people who have no clue and will believe whatever is convincing.

Given this, the market for "app that enables sharing, but has privacy controls, and is verifiably so" is a tiny circle somewhere in the middle of this grid.

Not privacy-focused, but OKCupid itself fit many of your requirements when it first came out. It wasn't aggressively seeking hyper growth and barely marketed outside of existing SparkNotes and SparkMatch users. It was just a few math nerds at Harvard that wanted to model human romantic compatibility by categorizing you into a shareable cutely named personality type, and they bolted on crowd-sourced questions to see if whatever they hadn't thought of themselves might be relevant.

Ten years later, the social media revolution is in full swing, the relatively small service they built that had catered mostly to nerds was suddenly lucrative, and they sell to Match Group and this happens.

To be entirely fair to these guys, I don't think they came into it intending to sell out as their long-term goal. But four guys who got into data analytics in college also didn't find themselves as their mid-30s approached particularly wanting to run a dating service for the rest of their lives, either.

Whatever happened to FetLife? If any dating service had to be privacy-focused, that was it.

Users who want to be private and are willing to pay extra for it are necessarily highly valuable for data brokers and advertisers. So incentives always push towards betraying them eventually I think.

> Am I too idealistic?

Open source developers are wildly idealistic. In the rest of the world, I have finally internalized...

1. Most people say they care about privacy... but won't spend even $1 for it. They care about their privacy about as much as an open source developer cares about user experience. Just extract the tarball, it's not that hard.

2. Most people don't care about technology and want it out of their lives. They don't want to know what sideloading is. They don't want to know how to discern safe from dangerous. And they aren't wrong. How many open source developers know how to drive manual? Car enthusiasts have just as much of a righteous claim to attention, after all. The model railroad enthusiasts are also upset by our community's lack of attention. Every enthusiast, in every field, hundreds of them, are upset by lack of mainstream attention, and this will never change.

3. Linux and open source software in general are not even close to being popular on the desktop. Gaming and web browsing is a tiny subset of what people buy PCs to do, and Linux isn't even close on the rest. Even the gaming success is so niche it's irrelevant in the grand scheme of things (Switch 2 outsold 3 years Steam Deck sales in the first 24 hours).

4. Some of this optimism was deluded from the start. Like when Stallman said we can defeat proprietary software with open source, then openly admitted he had no idea how any open source developers could afford rent. "If everyone works for free, while the big companies stop working, we could get ahead" is gobsmackingly naive and it's honestly astounding anyone fell for it.

Popular apps, like OKCupid, will get bought, along with their user data. Also, mission creeps when management changes.

I mean, an app that starts out as "privacy focused" won't necessarily stay that way.

F-Droid is the app store for such apps. FLOSS requirement ensures that everyone can verify the claims.

The problem is that large-scale use of the Internet for social networks and for organizing meetings in real life is fundamentally incompatible with privacy. It works for small, tight-knit insular groups, but as soon as you expand the scope of the network to include acquaintances and friends of friends you'll eventually find a connection to someone who cares less about privacy than about making a buck.

If we had a sort of "federated" system we'd still have this problem because you might always find yourself federated with someone who just wants to sell the information.

It's a cultural problem within this hyper-aggressive version of Capitalism that we've adopted, that even data about people has value. Until we decide as a culture that this kind of data sale or data use is shameful and unacceptable we'll be in this situation no matter what technical solution we adopt.

> we might see something approximating post-scarcity economics in our lifetimes

Can you elaborate more on this? All I see is growing inequality.

24andme was not free. Any investor backed startup or PE acquirable will sell all assets to Peter Thiel ventures eventually to make some last cash.

Most AI startups will never be profitable.

That's great if you live like it's still the 90s.

One issue is other people might still upload information about you, so you'd have to limit your irl interactions as well

No, they are different entities. Having the same founder does not mean much in this context. You signed a contract with 23andme, not Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.

Yep, I've made hundreds of dollars by being a Chicagoan who once used Facebook.

Lawyers: Besides whatever issue the company(ies) and investors might have with that behavior (self-dealing?), could it also let wronged individuals pierce the corporate veil, to go after personal assets?

Could this be the backstabbing surveillance capitalism incident that finally gives pause to tech executives?

I get the idea that the OkCupid founders & investors did as well as they could with their dating business, and as a "byproduct" they built up a valuable representative database along the way.

Money was already being made off the dating alone, and the accumulating facial data was a no-cost item from the beginning.

Even though the data is mainly just a working foundation for the dating service, eventually the database got so big that lots of value could be extracted in other ways.

It would be difficult to put an exact dollar figure on the value of a database like that itself for sure.

And selling it could be considered unethical in some peoples' eyes, so those in control could very well have decided to start that adjacent facial recognition company in response. After all, regardless of an inaccurately valued asset, OkCupid is not passing the data on to a different company for good. The dating company is not losing anything nor getting any compensation for it. OkCupid just keeps on going like normal while the new face-recognition company springs up.

This is AI. This "limited" facial recognition approach doesn't require ownership of the data, they just needed to "borrow" it for a while.

It stopped being good when Match bought them and turned it into Tinder 2.