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Disagree. I think the last fifty years proves that the vast majority of people will almost always go with convenience over some abstract ideal of "privacy".
by ryanwaggoner 8y ago
Disagree. I think the last fifty years proves that the vast majority of people will almost always go with convenience over some abstract ideal of "privacy".
- dpark 8y agoPeople don't care about privacy in the abstract but do care once it becomes concrete. If you ask someone if they are willing to let an impersonal algorithm analyze their data in exchange for a free service, the answer is generally yes. If you ask them if you can read their email and peruse their browsing history, the answer is almost always no. The problem privacy advocates have is forging a link between the abstract and the concrete. I don't really care that Experian compiles a list of my credit data. I really do care when they fuck up and leak it publicly. The tricky thing is that the former is a prerequisite for the latter, so I should care about that, too.
- ryanwaggoner 8y agoIf you ask someone if they are willing to let an impersonal algorithm analyze their data in exchange for a free service, the answer is generally yes. If you ask them if you can read their email and peruse their browsing history, the answer is almost always no. Exactly. That's why I put "privacy" in quotes. I think people are smarter than you give them credit for. I don't give out the password to my email account, but do I care that much if Google has some machine learning algorithm with a bunch of data points buried in there that I use the word "NYC" a lot? No, I really don't care. And yeah, they might get hacked and leak my emails to the world. That would suck. But that risk is worth it to me, and judging by the hundreds of millions of people with Gmail accounts, I'm not alone.