The combination of ubiquitous scanners, poor data controls on commercially owned date, and law enforcement access without proper warrants compounds to a situation that for many rational people would fail the test of being fair play under the Fourth Amendment. For similar reasons, for example, it has been held by the Supreme Court that installing a GPS tracker on a vehicle and monitoring it long-term without a warrant is a 4A violation (US v Jones). Similar cases have held that warrants are needed for cellphone location tracking.

So far, however, courts have not held Flock to the same standard -- or have at least held that Flock's data does not rise to the same standard.

I personally think this is a mistake and is a first-order reason we have this problem, and would prefer the matter to stop there rather than rely on ethics. (Relying on ethics brought us pollution in rivers, PFAS and Perc in the ground, and so on.)

Given the state of politics and the recent behavior of the Supreme Court, however, I would not hold my breath for this to change soon.

This same thing happens with marketing. Budgets get set. Agencies get hired. Branding and creative campaigns get developed and show up on the doorstep of the CEO hundreds of thousands of dollars deep. In engineering. In customer support. In finance (we have to do this, because the forecast cycle requires it; we can’t do that, because we don’t have the budget).

In founder culture, the founder gets down and dirty in the roadmapping process. They will give direct feedback on how a customer issue is routinely handled, or a design choice, or a creative campaign. Or a technical standard - Gates and Jobs both famously did this incisively and decisively. I’m no huge fan of Zuck, but it’s clear how much involvement he has with product and design for example. He famously bought Instagram because he wanted to, and understood its importance to facebook’s future, not because a strategy team identified it and a corp dev team engaged and investment banker to analyze and negotiate it. Mark Pincus was like this at Zynga too- ask anyone who was there.

Why is this important? Because people all the way down the organization don’t usually have the same nuanced understanding of the product, the market, the company strategy, the positioning, as you do. They will make decisions that optimize their subsystem but are sub optimal to the system. I had a customer support manager recently ask me if he could move a set of things that was causing a lot of load on his team to our law firm. The law firm of course charges 10-30xx per hour what a customer support agent makes. Even if you do a good job evangelizing the company mission and hiring non-mercenaries and whatnot, again and again and again you will see people wanting to “professionalize” their teams in ways that add more process, slow things down, and attenuate impact.

So If you let your company get into manager mode, you really lose control of the boat. And if you try to operate in founder mode after hiring a bunch of managers, they pissed because they don’t want to be micromanaged. But if they were crushing it, you wouldn’t need to.

I think the best founders are able to navigate this dynamic effectively, whether that’s by being able to effectively make a jump to a more delegated model, or building a team that can leverage their strengths without snuffing their hands-on involvement, or taking back the wheel at the right time.

A good counter example I can think of is Yahoo, when Jerry Yang took back over after Terry Semel retired. Manager culture had deeply set in there, and was not reversible despite Jerry’s good efforts and some great executives who were aligned to it. (And yes, the big, Steve Jobs inspired, “fix the company retreat” they did was literally “VP’s and up”.). As someone who worked there, was not a VP, but likely would have been in a “top contributing employees” cull by different measures, it was extremely painful to experience.

I would note that it takes a lot of energy to sustain this mode and be a leader through it, or to make changes in this direction to course correct.

Doing it the opposite way - tying all outbound school/camp calls to a single callerID - risks blending the important with the automated reminders. LAUSD abuses their automated calling system to the extent that my wife and I have both screened calls from the front office involving an injured child, more than once.

The real issue here is getting to the root cause, which is carriers and their intermediary aggregators having incentives to carry large volumes of spam.

In a number of markets, operators have increased the cost of SMS messages to deter spam, only to find a massive increase in traffic pumping fraud that mysteriously appears in the system of trusted intermediaries. Everyone's making a goddamn fortune off it, and no one actually cares to fix it.

Do you have any top-5 templates you can describe or share?

We're doing an internal review and looking for best practices. What works well for you?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24509337

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20274088

Points: 16

# Comments: 3

TL;DR Phone numbers are not unique ID keys for people. But it seems like many companies view it as an easy, cheap 2nd factor (generally, "something you have"), to be combined with a strong password ("something you know").

The problem of course being that SIM-bound number can be hacked or stolen, and non-SIM-bound numbers are not actually "something you have". If a Google Voice number is controlled by the same login as a gmail account, there goes your 2nd factor.

A lot of people do use Burner for this per the link above. (I'm a founder).

Burner is innovating at the intersection of software and telecom by offering smart virtual numbers that help users maintain privacy, organize their communications, and manage their identities online. We have a thought leadership position on user privacy and control and are at the forefront of what phone numbers are capable of when treated like smart software rather than dumb directory endpoints.

We are also a founder-led team generating millions of dollars in revenue and "control our destiny" from a VC point of view, while growing well. We have recently hired a fantastic new CTO and are building up our engineering and product teams to further innovate and drive the value and utility of Burner to our users, while also exploring other opportunities. We are hiring a DevOps lead (kubernetes, docker, terraform), an Android Developer (Java/Kotlin), an iOS Engineer (Swift), and a Platform Engineer (Scala) to join our team. We will also review strong candidates from other disciplines warmly.

We've been based in Atwater Village, Los Angeles since before it started blowing up and have a great team, culture, and office vibe.

https://www.burnerapp.com/careers

jobs@adhoclabs.co

Burner (Ad Hoc Labs, Inc.) Burner is empowering people to take control over their primary channel of communication – the phone number.

As DevOps Engineer, you will be a key member of a team building the next generation of mobile privacy tools, working closely with the platform team to upgrade and maintain existing infrastructure while helping to design and deploy the next generation of services to power the Burner mobile apps.

Details & apply: https://www.burnerapp.com/careers/devops-engineer

Good luck with it!

I might suggest your "buzzfeed for books" comparison doesn't do it justice. Perhaps "Pinterest for books" or "Reddit for books"?

As feedback, a few thoughts off the cuff: - I'm hesitant to auth Twitter, because you ask for permission to post but don't do the thing where you promise never to post on my behalf without advance warning. - I think the "shelves" model is interesting. I'm definitely interested in what David Bowie found interesting. Maybe not so much Art Garfunkel (though IIRC he is an obsessive reader so who knows) - It would be interesting if there was some cut where, for a given book on a given shelf, you could see other popular/relevant shelves it was on. Sort of the way Twitter surfaces tweets in your timeline that were liked by a friend. - Maybe a view of just books, not shelves. - I want to see what others had to say about these books, not just whose shelves they're on. Maybe that comes later, when you have more activity? - Looks like you can add a book to your reading list, "heart" it, or "heart" a whole shelf. This is a slightly confusing information architecture, vs. something like on Airbnb which has a clear architecture of saving properties you like to a list. Might want to refine that a bit.

As in, "Uber also claims that, contrary to paperwork filed with the Nevada DMV, it has never deployed a custom LiDAR system in any of its cars or trucks and will not be ready to do so by the time the case is slated to go to trial in October."

(Edit for formatting.)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14035690

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

--- The Burner API enables programmatic access to core telephony functions like sending and receiving messages and media, as well as the “business logic” layer we’ve spent years building.

Key Burner features include per-line configuration and settings, contact management, blocking and muting, content filtering, text auto-responses, and more.

Full API access to Burner means developers can now build integrations that enhance and extend Burner’s messaging and application capabilities in ways that we believe represent the future of smart phone numbers.

Developers can also take advantage of this API to embed Burner’s basic and enhanced calling and messaging experiences into their apps via OAuth. Your users get all the benefits and features of our top-rated voice and messaging client (and the support and business functions that stand behind it), while you get all the benefits of controlling the phone number at the network level. In effect, you can treat the Burner app itself as a service, rather than building your own “last mile” on top of a bare-bones telephony API.

We also offer incoming and outgoing webhooks that can be used in conjunction with API access or enabled per Burner Line via our Developer Connection.