It is possible that the 'nanny state' is both good in some ways and bad in others. You and I benefit in uncountable ways every day from the protections granted by such a system, without realizing it.
Nuance is tough. It is easier to find a simple thing to blame and advocate against it. But nothing is simple -- governments are composed of people and those people have inside them conflicting motivations, each person's different than the other -- and most of them are not malicious. The same with business, and with the public.
Let's look at issues on their own and not try to categorize everything as part of a black and white choice.
Society benefits from allowing new inventions then banning those that turn out to be harmful, once the harm is clear.
The result is that you keep the good inventions and discard the harmful ones.
What people are proposing here is to preemptively ban new inventions even when there’s no evidence of harm. It’s not a good idea because while it will stop the bad inventions, it will also stop the good ones.
There is a concept of 'risk'. Making any choice, yea or nay, comes with risks, and they should be evaluated and acted up as per the risk tolerance of people at the time. You are saying that we should disregard any rational evaluation of potential risks on one side and only choose one option all the time. Is that a logical position to hold?
No, I’m saying we shouldn’t be so quick to jump to banning things without a clear reason.
This thread is full of people suggesting Facebook be banned from behaving this way based on little more than gut-feel. They aren’t even capable of giving a hypothesis for harm this could be harmful.
And to think if Facebook just let people opt-in we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Harmful or not, did Facebook, who is bringing in billions in profit every three months, really have to do it this way?
Nuance is tough. It is easier to find a simple thing to blame and advocate against it. But nothing is simple -- governments are composed of people and those people have inside them conflicting motivations, each person's different than the other -- and most of them are not malicious. The same with business, and with the public.
Let's look at issues on their own and not try to categorize everything as part of a black and white choice.