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That's because to the average person, the privacy fears of the average HNer make no sense. Even if something extremely bad might happen as a result of violation

That's because to the average person, the privacy fears of the average HNer make no sense. Even if something extremely bad might happen as a result of violations of my privacy, the chances seem fairly low. In that sense, it's no different than millions of other fears high-impact-low-chance fears that we happily go through life ignoring. What's your most convincing argument for why an average person should care more? Explain it to me like I'm 5.

bradgessler 7y ago
I would also add that some of the most compelling rationale, at least in the US, would likely cite oppressive regimes that seem distant geographically and historically. “That would never happen here!” is the thinking.
mbesto 7y ago
> What's your most convincing argument for why an average person should care more? Laymen Argument 1: Mark Zuckerburg who has majority control of the largest source of private data in the world bought the two plots of land next to him for privacy reasons. Laymen Argument 2: Forward me all of your emails if privacy isn't an issue. crickets The average person doesn't care about these because it doesn't affect them right now, but it's a "boil the frog" situation...you won't know you're getting boiled to death until it's too late.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > Forward me all of your emails if privacy isn't an issue. What do I get in return? Privacy is a trade off, and that's how it's sold. "We need more CCTV cameras to stop crime". Do you want more crime or more privacy? Depends on how bad the crime is, I guess. "We need to record your likes to show you more stuff you like". Is FB worth it? It is to many, apparently.
  - sgift 7y ago
    > "We need more CCTV cameras to stop crime" The point that the people who argue against privacy are liars which will abuse fears to try to get people on their side was missing so far. Thanks for adding it. > "We need to record your likes to show you more stuff you like" Okay. You can only use it for that.
    - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
      > The point that the people who argue against privacy are liars which will abuse fears to try to get people on their side was missing so far. Thanks for adding it. Do you honestly believe that CCTV is completely useless wrt crime prevention and detection?
  - PavlovsCat 7y ago
    > Is FB worth it? It is to many, apparently. It's highly interesting that nobody would even dream of saying something like "apparently, most people on Earth think transsexuals are evil", or "do global warming and the increasing extinctions of species matter? not according to most, apparently". Why do people in "tech" outsource their judgement on this topic to people who aren't even in the room, a mythical "average person", every single time the issue comes up? What was the breaking point for, say, to start fighting for and making headway when it came to sexual self-determination? Once more than half of the people on the planet were for it? Or did Rosa Parks decide "now is the time, most people in the US support the end of segregation, now that it's only a formality, I won't change seats?". No, that's not how it works. You figure out what you consider to be right, and then you fight for it. You don't know the outcome, you know what you know to be right, or wrong. You get sick of something, and then you refuse to participate in it, because you'd rather die. And historically, it sometimes takes a small amount of dedicated people to change things for the better. I haven't seen a person who is really strong-willed about not caring about their own privacy. It's not like most people who "don't care about privacy" are fighting against it, they're sleepwalking. They'll just as happily sleepwalk into another direction, so that they don't care can't be an excuse, ever. Right now, it's easier, and less socially painful, to not care about privacy. That can be changed. If people don't have experience with totalitarianism, and don't learn about it, and don't smell it in the wind today, then of course they will balk at any inconvenience to prevent it. But if it happens again on sufficient scale, it'll be a point of no return. There will be no more humanity; Earth will be an eternal torture chamber at worst, just empty of human agency at best, at any rate a boot stamping on a human face, forever. You would just need a way to give someone a really lucid dream, getting tortured for a few weeks in a dictatorship. Upon waking up, they will realize they need a few tools, privacy and human rights that apply to all being among them. People who don't have the empathy and imagination to have completed such thought experiments in their youth don't have any blessing to give, so I wouldn't even worry about ways to retrieve it from them.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      > Why do people in "tech" outsource their judgement on this topic to people who aren't even in the room I'm not outsourcing my judgement, I don't use Facebook. But many people do, so they seem to view it as a net benefit, unless Facebook has literally started to strap people to their chairs and force them onto the app. You can argue that they are wrong and shouldn't value "connecting with friends and seeing memes" over privacy, but that's a different discussion. You're conflating rights issues with a choice. You can choose to use Facebook just as you can choose to drink coffee, eat lots of sugar or live a sedentary life style. Sure, let's talk about free will, but that's completely unlike sexual self-determination, slavery, segregation etc. > You figure out what you consider to be right, and then you fight for it. No, I don't. I figure it's right to not drink alcohol, but I don't fight so that nobody may drink alcohol. I just don't drink it, but it's fine if you do. Be their free will or not, I'm not forcing anybody to live by my standards.
- baddox 7y ago
  1. Mark Zuckerberg has a much larger risk of negative privacy consequences than the average person. Also, this was probably done more for physical safety than for privacy. 2. If all of people’s emails we’re getting forwarded to random other people they encounter on online forums like HN, then people would be upset. The point is that people don’t get terribly upset at extremely small risks of minor negative consequences from privacy issues. These counterarguments are pretty weak, and are essentially: Oh, so you don’t worry about getting struck by lightning? Then why don’t you go out in a field holding a lightning rod during a lightning storm? crickets
  - mbesto 7y ago
    > The point is that people don’t get terribly upset at extremely small risks of minor negative consequences from privacy issues. No, they don't get terribly upset because they don't (1) understand the potential consequences well enough and (2) it doesn't affect them until it does. We have a very clear mental model of what happens if we get struck by lightning (I go to the hospital and my skin gets charred) but we don't for data privacy.
    - baddox 7y ago
      I mean, does anyone have a scientific threat model for subtle changes in privacy policy? I doubt it. I imagine we’re all just guessing.
      - mbesto 7y ago
        Huh? Not sure what privacy policies have to do with this. I'm talking about the mental model for the consequences of giving your privacy up. The mental model for the getting hit by a lightning strike is pretty clear for most people...fire = physical hurt...giving privacy up? Not so much.
- vegasdew 7y ago
  > Mark Zuckerburg who has majority control of the largest source of private data in the world bought the two plots of land next to him for privacy reasons. President of USA, travels with a ~100 men security cover all the time, does not mean USA is unsafe to move around and you should stay in home with a gun in hand.
  - mbesto 7y ago
    privacy != security
    - johncolanduoni 7y ago
      Sure, but what makes the analogy not hold? Just as there are more parties interested in harming a president, there are more parties interested in spying on Zuckerberg than you or I.
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    > President of USA, travels with a ~100 men security cover all the time, does not mean USA is unsafe to move around It doesn’t??? Most other OECD presidents/PMs/HoS don’t bother.
    - xlii 7y ago
      To be fair US president is said to be single most powerful person in the world. I don’t have any data to back it up but I could see them being no. 1 assassination target globally. OTOH few years back I was walking and passing near former president of my small European country. Since he is rather charismatic I asked if I can shake his hand and get a photo. He agreed and we did so, however I learned few minutes later from a friend lagging behind, that couple random bystanders twitched and totally focused on our interaction. Obviously personal security. So it’s not like security isn’t there, we might just not see it.
      - ben_w 7y ago
        I’m not sure about that counter-argument. POTUS is currently the most powerful position in the world, but between 1850 and 1915 (approximate dates), I think the British and possibly French empires were more powerful. In this time period, three American presidents were assassinated. The UK lost one MP, who was not the PM, and apparently the killers only targeted him because he happened to be walking with their main target at the time. None of the UK royals were assassinated in that period.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  Counter 1: zuck uses Facebook. Counter 2: I don't trust you doesn't mean I trust no one. I wouldn't give you 20k to watch either, but I would give that much to a bank without a second thought.
  - ALittleLight 7y ago
    The point about number two is that you don't get to choose who gets the information. Privacy means you choose what information about you is shared and with whom. An invasion of privacy is taking that control away.
stonecraftwolf 7y ago
I don’t think this is accurate. People are often frightened of unlikely things so long as they feel they can do something about it. But when a threat seems incomprehensible and they feel powerless to do anything about it (at least partially bc they do not understand it), they will shut it out and shut down rather than confront it, because it overwhelms their ability to cope with it emotionally and paralyzes them. Incomprehensibility and powerlessness are overwhelming emotions. They flood the nervous system, so people shut them out in order to be able to continue to function on a daily basis. It’s the same reason why people continue to ignore climate change. It’s not a rational problem, or a probabilistic one. It’s a problem of emotion. It’s a trauma problem.
- luckylion 7y ago
  Are you sure? It seems to me that most people just have more important stuff to worry about. Paying taxes, rent, buying food, health issues, personal safety etc. Privacy seems to be a luxury topic, and thus is more important to those that need not worry about the fundamentals.
  - specialist 7y ago
    Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase "autoamputation" to describe the phenomenon of shutting down when overstimulated. I don't know if his insights have since been confirmed.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  If people are actually powerless to combat a threat, it's rational to shut it out. There's no sense worrying about things you can't control. The irrational response is to obsess about it and take mental energy away from things you can control. (This is also similar to why we don't worry about an asteroid striking the earth, a pandemic wiping out humanity, or nuclear war. There is little that we personally can do, so why spend mental energy?)
libraryatnight 7y ago
There is no convincing argument. The "I have nothing to hide" defense is one that can't be toppled until they experience something that illuminates it for them (something I haven't seen happen), argument/discussion is worthless. My family, friends, and co-workers (developers) all use this. They do not care, and those of us who do are, to them, weirdly concerned about something trivial in their mind.
- mdorazio 7y ago
  The best response to this is an overt question to do something that massively invades privacy. Ex., "Can I watch you have sex if you have nothing to hide?". The obvious and immediate answer is, "Of course not." which opens the door to a dialogue about why privacy is important regardless of whether or not you have something to hide.
  - libraryatnight 7y ago
    Nah. That doesn't work. They just say "nobody is watching me shower/have sex/etc" and that pretty much kills it. Until someone actually watches them have sex and they know about it, they won't care.
  - baddox 7y ago
    But people would already get upset at privacy violations of that kind and magnitude.
    - arvinsim 7y ago
      But it doesn't happen on the mass scale on that kind of magnitude. Hence, the indifference.
- autoexec 7y ago
  This is why I think most people don't care about privacy issues. They may run into all kinds of situations where they are screwed over because of the data companies have collected from them. Their health insurance rates might go up, they might not get a call back from a potential employer, they might even have their identity stolen but they won't know any of that was caused by the data a company took from them that was eventually sold or leaked to others. If they don't know when their data is used against them, or how, or by who it doesn't change the fact that they are worse off for it, but they don't have the ability to connect the dots and see the problem.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Plenty that's extremely bad is already happening as a result of privacy violations. Probably affecting most of us. Trouble is they're invisible. For one example, we saw with Cambridge Analytica that political advertising can be tuned to your personal hot button issues. Those worried by immigration can be sent an outright (and outrageous) lie that remaining in the EU will result in all of Turkey moving to the UK. Those with different interests/concerns got different ads. Turns out many of them were illegal too. No one knew until too late because it was invisible to all except the advertiser, Facebook (in this case) and recipient. Until it becomes visible - it's really hard to make people care, or realise. Perhaps a few on the receiving end of the brexit/CA issue realised, if they remember the ads they saw, and read one of the many follow up stories. Like anything algorithmic, unless you a-b test how do you know what you saw that others didn't, what you aren't seeing, or where it discriminates? Keep this up and we could easily lose most of the progress of the 20th century, invisibly.
- abledon 7y ago
  So I see ads that other people don’t see? — I think you failed to convince 90% of people it’s “extremely bad”,( id say something like ww2 is “extremely bad” )
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    Death and destruction are absolutely terrible. They are not the only way to reshape or destroy a society. Like the parent comment said, the tools of mass manipulation that can be created with the data and platforms available today can have just as broad of an effect over time, if not moreso because it's invisible. How would you convince someone of that?
    - eastendguy 7y ago
      Targeted ads/messages beyond very broad categories such as "business owner" or "looking for a vacation" should be made illegal. This time the law needs to safe us from technology.
  - 7y ago
mr_toad 7y ago
How would they even know if it affected them? It’s not easy to see that you’re paying more online, or being offered different ads and products because of all the personal data collected about you.
mirimir 7y ago
For most Americans, the major privacy concerns are (or ought to be) around speeding and other more-or-less minor moving violations, illegal drug shipments, and copyright violations. For speeding etc, potential impacts are mainly fines, higher insurance rates, and potential license loss. Illegal drug shipments for older people are mainly offshore pharmacies. And that's not heavily penalized, with confiscation and warning letters being the norm. Otherwise it's recreational drugs. And apparently that's also rarely prosecuted, except for dealers. It also seems that copyright violations aren't being heavily prosecuted. I guess that the MPAA figured out that bad PR was worse than people pirating. More generally, there's the issue of being gamed by well informed sellers. Basically paying more for stuff that they know we really want. And getting tricked into buying stuff that we don't really need. Also, electing candidates that we don't really want ;)
satya71 7y ago
Freedom and Privacy are tightly coupled. One cannot truly be free if one's every action is monitored or manipulated. That is why the right to privacy was recognized by the US Supreme Court as inferred from the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments even though privacy was never mentioned in the Constitution.
flukus 7y ago
> What's your most convincing argument for why an average person should care more? Explain it to me like I'm 5. You're going to pay more than me every time you buy something because your profile indicates you aren't as price sensitive. That's just commercial surveillance though.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
Unfortunately, if your "paranoia" successfully protects you, you can't prove that nothing bad happened because of it. The world has a terrible habit of not counting bad things that should have happened but didn't, even in cases where we know with a fair degree of confidence that it should have gone worse. Prime examples: Y2K is often remembered as "Ha! Can you believe they ever thought that was going to be a real problem!" It was predicted the Kuwait oil fires would burn for years and be a global environmental catastrophe. They were put out in six months. We didn't celebrate this amazing success on par with the hand wringing we had done about the expected outcome. No one danced in the streets at this glorious news that we averted disaster globally. Instead, it was a minor footnote in stories with more drama.
klyrs 7y ago
Your trove of personal data has monetary value. With a few pieces of info, your identity can be stolen. If a company gets hacked or an employee siphons data, it's sold and used, with you facing severe consequences and maybe them too
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  Ok, now explain why I should trust a bank with my money, but not $any-internet-company with my personal info.
  - klyrs 7y ago
    Trust is an emotion, I won't rationalize it for you. You can distract yourself and others with math and rules and sturdy construction, but there's always sidechannels.
    - joshuamorton 7y ago
      So, your argument is "someone might break into the bank". Do you keep your money under a mattress too?
      - mirimir 7y ago
        Some of it, yes :) I have ~$30K in gold and silver, in plastic boxes hidden under my bed. But you'd need to remove floorboards to access it. I bought for cash at swap meets, years ago.
      - klyrs 7y ago
        Twice now, you've over-interpreted something I've said, and this one's particularly reductive. No, my argument is that security is theatrical. What makes you think that my matress is safer than a bank?
        joshuamorton 7y ago
        > What makes you think that my matress is safer than a bank? Nothing, hence my confusion. > No, my argument is that security is theatrical. Claiming this in a general sense is a strong claim. Are you suggesting that end to end encryption is theatrical? Or by sidechannels do you mean that anyone can come along and beat you with a hose until you reveal your password? You're being very coy, speaking only in vagueties, and that makes it difficult to not overinterpret what you're saying. In fact you seem self-contradictory, saying that security is theatrical yet appearing to claim a bank is safer than a mattress. Which is it?
austhrow743 7y ago
There have been a lot of data breaches in companies. If a company has information about you there is a decent chance it will become public sometime in the future. Google knows who you are and everything you've searched for and almost every website you've looked at. Facebook knows who you are and every picture and profile that you've ever looked at. Someone could leak this information and then everyone will know what a horrid little pervert you are. I'm not sure 5 year olds share the same fears as adults so think of it more as an explain like I'm 15.
- nostrebored 7y ago
  Maybe just don't be a pervert? If my search history were leaked I'd still go about my life happily.
  - annodomini2019 7y ago
    Ah, the old “I have nothing to hide” argument.
  - brianpgordon 7y ago
    You can't think of any reason why someone might not want everyone they know to be aware of what they're searching for? Do you think someone's who's been sexually assaulted and tried to search for resources online would like their coworkers to find out about it? Do you think someone with HIV, or depression, wants everyone in the world to know? What if someone is in an abusive relationship and they reach out for help online and their abuser finds out before they can safely get out? What if you have some teenager who's homosexual or atheist in a conservative religious community and people find out through their search history - they could be killed, or cut off from their family. I could go on and on. At some point in their life almost everyone is going to run into something that they need to educate themselves about and that they don't want the whole world to know about. What's your suggestion, that they go to a library and try to check out a book about it?
  - slavak 7y ago
    What if I _like_ being a pervert? If I like midget porn, or have a foot fetish, why exactly should I have to suppress that? It's not illegal, and it's not immoral, but I'd still prefer my coworkers not be aware of the specifics of how and why I get my rocks off.
1e-9 7y ago
Yes, it seems most people are unwilling to give up a concrete benefit to avoid a hypothetical threat. I think the privacy threat will only seem concrete when a higher percentage of people are expressing concern over it. I have not found a short, compelling argument that works for everyone, or even most everyone. The best approach I know is to tailor an argument to the individual in order to present the privacy threat they might most care about. Even with a tailored argument, I would guess that less than 20% of nontechnical people are swayed by what I say. I take hope in the fact that there is evidence societal norms can be changed by a surprisingly small minority[1]. [1] https://ndg.asc.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Centola-et-al.-2018-Science.-Tipping-Point.pdf https://ndg.asc.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Centola...
trophycase 7y ago
They make no sense because they can't or don't understand the second order effects of not having privacy. Plenty of them still think there is "some guy in the CIA watching me masturbate", and think they are immune to constantly being brainwashed, or that resistance to status-quo neoliberal capitalism is something only "bad people" do. They don't understand that things like the French Revolution don't happen when surveillance is ubiquitous, and when beliefs and desires are shaped by people trying to either sell you something or make you believe something or make you behave.
michelledepeil 7y ago
The ELI5 I always tend to fall back on is the example of the Dutch Jewry. The tale goes that The Netherlands had a beautiful list of all its citizens, their names, addresses and their religious statusses neatly tucked away in a locked filing cabinet behind a locked door in the town hall. Come 1940 the Nazis had a beautiful "leaked database" to use as a reference.
- kkarakk 7y ago
  well nowadays we have better tech for that. you can simply "infer" someone's preferences/values according to their social graph/spending graph(and trivially) This is easily obtainable information for any regulatory type oversight government level agency(DEA/ICE in the US) if the appropriate presidential order goes through
- pferde 7y ago
  I'm not sure a five years old child would even understand what or who a Jew is, or where Netherlands is (the ELI5 meme needs to die a fiery death), but otherwise, a very good example.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    Example of what? Is everything Nazis used supposed to be banned? Weapons, food, water, computers, trains? Doesn’t seem like “Nazis used it, therefore it’s bad” is a valid argument. I agree that the government having a list of personal preferences for no reason is bad, but census data is useful for other reasons, and not having it isn’t going to stop other committed groups of people from doing bad things.
- andyv 7y ago
  ... And in 1942, the US had the 1940 census that enabled sending citizens of Japanese ancestry to camps. Today they'd use 23andme, and only your relatives have to sign up for them to get you.
  - michelledepeil 7y ago
yason 7y ago
I think the average person cares about privacy either in a localised context or a pathological context. They don't want their neighbours to see inside their house, they don't want all their friends know what some of their friends know about them, and they might not want their spouses to know what sort of porn they watch. Simple enough. They also understand they don't want to live in a DDR era surveillance by a central government, one that is obviously a bad and violent actor. But tracking of data on the internet and refining personal information to build a profile, an identity is sort of impersonal. It's not local or pathological. There is no such context for privacy (or the lack of it). The person doesn't have a relationship towards these unknown surveying and tracking parties and, conversely, they really don't know these people in the social sense. People might realise that their social media posts, shopping habits, and browsing habits might be collected under a profile somewhere but for the most part that's just a bunch of data somewhere: there's no evidence that this profile would change the behaviour of other people who are relevant in the person's life. Being a programmer, I have to admit I don't know myself how bad things could turn, for instance, in my own case. For the most part, even I don't see any immediate threats with Google or Facebook having some bits of my personal life stored online or Amazon having a good history of what sort of things I've so far needed. What keeps me from being liberal in sharing stuff is merely my nerd instinct: I just know I don't want to expose too much surface to the outside unnecessarily. Hence incognito windows, Firefox containers, ad blockers, uBlock, and other stuff. But fifteen years of Google and ten years of Facebook have not really had any unwanted influence in my real (i.e. physical) life. I also grew up in an internet where pseudonyms were the norm so it's always an exception to give a service my real name. Data breach and identity theft? The risk is fairly low and the latter happens even without breaches into online personal data. Custom pricing? I hunt for prices in private windows so that I'm less likely to trigger an interest for an item, and potentially higher prices, in the browser that has links to my personal profile. Sensitive information? I don't think my blood test results or list of surgical operations would stand out much: surely I have things in that area I don't want all my friends or relatives to know but worrying about that would have to mean the information I have stored on Google and some medical providers' profiles would have to become publicly accessible and my friends or relatives would have to know to look for them and then identify my records to find out. That's a long bridge to be built, I don't think it's a particularly realistic worry. Do I have something to hide? As much as I hate that argument and while there surely are things I don't advertise and my friends don't know about they could just ask and I'd probably tell them. If a stranger sat next to me and told me something about my life I thought only I knew is both unexpected and a bit hypothetical. The privacy would now have become local and I'd probably be more interested in the social context, i.e. what would the stranger want to approach me like that and what would be the price. On the other hand, if all he has is information then all he can do is reveal it. I don't think any of that information would be detrimental. Uncomfortable, maybe, but not the end of the world. And I'll be dead anyway in fifty years. Connectivity surveillance? I'm not particularly worried that my ISP or government will see who I've called. They aren't interested in me personally. My frieds might be but the chance of them getting access to that information is slim. Again I don't like the idea of logging connectivity but I personally don't see the downsides either. Most of the stuff online is also quite transient. The value of me buying a particular tool ten years ago is only so much. I'll block ads anyway. I am perhaps an average person in that sense. I know there's a strong sense of "not right" in collecting so much information, and as a programmer I know how data can be massaged into information but I can't see credible enough threats on a personal level in that area to change much of even my own behaviour. I'm not surprised that average people aren't all freaked out about tracking and online privacy issues.
rasz 7y ago
Your mums bobs and vegana pictures siphoned off the smartphone and plastered all over pronhub, this argument seems to work rather well.
- andrewnicolalde 7y ago
  Does HN actually censor those words?
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    No.
  - rasz 7y ago
    Thats the clue to answer follow up question of 'why would anyone?' (not famous, not exactly a model material etc, wouldnt make any money out of it). Memes, for the memes mum/sister/aunt/sister-in-law. In the olden days finding your friends mum on guesshermuff blog was all the rage.
mch82 7y ago
Would Martin Luther King have enough privacy in 2019 to organize the civil rights movement? Would Ghandi have enough privacy to lead the Indian independence movement? I hope the answer is still yes, but once the answer becomes no then everyone cares. That’s my attempt to explain.
- chr1 7y ago
  But would they need privacy, or could they use open communications instead? It's one thing when you know peoples rights are being violated somewhere, it's another if you can see that live on youtube. I think if anything current tech would make civil rights movements easier. My example is last years revolution in Armenia. Police knew all of the initial group of protesters, and tapped all their phonecalls, but by decentralizing, by using low risk forms of protests (e.g. honking, blocking the streets by going back and forth on the crossing), by using constant live streams from everywhere, protesters managed to gain and demonstrate support of enough people that the old government had to give up.
pferde 7y ago
Even five year olds are taught not to talk to strangers and not to tell them anything. But somehow there seems to be a cognitive dissonance, where people are more than happy to share absolutely everything to anyone, just because it's happening in comfort and privacy of their home, while typing into a device they own.
- lmm 7y ago
  It's terrible advice to five year olds though. Most people are decent, nothing bad will come of talking to strangers in the overwhelming majority of cases (particularly if it's someone you approach rather than someone who approaches you). Whereas we've had children e.g. come close to dying of exposure because they'd been taught not to talk to strangers.
kacamak 7y ago
Let's say your wife is looking for a job, but you plan on having kids some time in the future. That data is collected by either facebook, whatsapp, your mobile phone provider or something else. Or her data collecting menstrual calendar isa sending back info (yes this actually exists). Now, it's illegal to ask that in an inteview, but the boss might buy that data, and your wife will never get a job. Let's say you are a supporter of a political movement that is not mainstream, all of that data can be used to exclude you from society one small step at a time.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  Or her data collecting menstrual calendar isa sending back info (yes this actually exists). Not only do such services exist, they are already selling the data and for exactly the purpose you describe iirc: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18988289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18988289
- circlefavshape 7y ago
  > your wife will never get a job Oh come on. If "the boss" is interviewing a married woman of a certain age he/she already knows there's a good chance of children on the horizon.
privacySuspect 7y ago
>What's your most convincing argument for why an average person should care more? Explain it to me like I'm 5. Account was created four hours ago to ask this specific question. Not sure if it's a practice in information warfare by <insert three-lettered agency here> or what the deal is but that's highly suspect.
- lmm 7y ago
  It's a position that will attract knee-jerk downvotes on HN, I can understand wanting to use a throwaway for it.
- mirimir 7y ago
  Very funny :) I guess it'd be the same reason why you created this account 57 minutes ago to ask about it ;) Which is (I guess) that many here aren't anonymous, so they create throwaways whenever they post.
pavelludiq 7y ago
The holocaust was in many ways enabled by mass surveillance. How about we start there. It was done mostly manually, but even something as trivial as census data from an occupied country likely killed an unimaginable amount of people. Then of course you had the eastern block where the authorities would've been wetting their pants at the surveillance capability of a modern private individual, let alone a corp or government. These are not theoretical questions, we've played this game before and now we have really big toys.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I hate the "Holocaust census data" argument because presented like this, it can be used to demonize pretty much anything. Yes, Nazis used census data because it was available. Were it not, they would've used something else. When a band of monsters with resources of a country wants to get you, they will get you. You have to consider the possibility of it, but in times of peace, it's no way for living. Census data isn't collected in anticipation of future monsters in power - it's collected to provide immediate benefit to citizens. The right answer is not "this dataset shouldn't exist" - it's "what benefits does this data give us, and do those benefits outweigh the risk of abuse?".
teddyh 7y ago
I usually link to this 2006 column by Bruce Schneier – it is both lucid and succinct: The Eternal Value of Privacy https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/ https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/
tomatocracy 7y ago
> What's your most convincing argument for why an average person should care more? Explain it to me like I'm 5. The data leak of HIV patients' identities which happened in the UK a couple of years ago. Think you'd struggle to find anyone who thought "Oh, that's not a problem - noone really needs privacy". I think most people also understand that there should be general enough rules to cover all situations like that. The challenge in my view isn't explaining why privacy is good and needed. It's convincing them that their privacy is actually at risk.
rvp-x 7y ago
You could never completely cut people from your life. That awful ex-partner knows where you work, when & where you're out with friends. They can show up.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
I think there's another factor to consider: people recognize that you can't put the cat back in the bag. The modern world just makes it far too easy to track people, find people, spy on people, etc. and you can try regulating that away but the technology doesn't stop existing and, in fact, just keeps getting better and cheaper. In other words: it is a lost cause.

bradgessler 7y ago

I would also add that some of the most compelling rationale, at least in the US, would likely cite oppressive regimes that seem distant geographically and historically. “That would never happen here!” is the thinking.

mbesto 7y ago

> What's your most convincing argument for why an average person should care more? Laymen Argument 1: Mark Zuckerburg who has majority control of the largest source of private data in the world bought the two plots of land next to him for privacy reasons. Laymen Argument 2: Forward me all of your emails if privacy isn't an issue. crickets The average person doesn't care about these because it doesn't affect them right now, but it's a "boil the frog" situation...you won't know you're getting boiled to death until it's too late.

luckylion 7y ago
> Forward me all of your emails if privacy isn't an issue. What do I get in return? Privacy is a trade off, and that's how it's sold. "We need more CCTV cameras to stop crime". Do you want more crime or more privacy? Depends on how bad the crime is, I guess. "We need to record your likes to show you more stuff you like". Is FB worth it? It is to many, apparently.
- sgift 7y ago
  > "We need more CCTV cameras to stop crime" The point that the people who argue against privacy are liars which will abuse fears to try to get people on their side was missing so far. Thanks for adding it. > "We need to record your likes to show you more stuff you like" Okay. You can only use it for that.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
    > The point that the people who argue against privacy are liars which will abuse fears to try to get people on their side was missing so far. Thanks for adding it. Do you honestly believe that CCTV is completely useless wrt crime prevention and detection?
- PavlovsCat 7y ago
  > Is FB worth it? It is to many, apparently. It's highly interesting that nobody would even dream of saying something like "apparently, most people on Earth think transsexuals are evil", or "do global warming and the increasing extinctions of species matter? not according to most, apparently". Why do people in "tech" outsource their judgement on this topic to people who aren't even in the room, a mythical "average person", every single time the issue comes up? What was the breaking point for, say, to start fighting for and making headway when it came to sexual self-determination? Once more than half of the people on the planet were for it? Or did Rosa Parks decide "now is the time, most people in the US support the end of segregation, now that it's only a formality, I won't change seats?". No, that's not how it works. You figure out what you consider to be right, and then you fight for it. You don't know the outcome, you know what you know to be right, or wrong. You get sick of something, and then you refuse to participate in it, because you'd rather die. And historically, it sometimes takes a small amount of dedicated people to change things for the better. I haven't seen a person who is really strong-willed about not caring about their own privacy. It's not like most people who "don't care about privacy" are fighting against it, they're sleepwalking. They'll just as happily sleepwalk into another direction, so that they don't care can't be an excuse, ever. Right now, it's easier, and less socially painful, to not care about privacy. That can be changed. If people don't have experience with totalitarianism, and don't learn about it, and don't smell it in the wind today, then of course they will balk at any inconvenience to prevent it. But if it happens again on sufficient scale, it'll be a point of no return. There will be no more humanity; Earth will be an eternal torture chamber at worst, just empty of human agency at best, at any rate a boot stamping on a human face, forever. You would just need a way to give someone a really lucid dream, getting tortured for a few weeks in a dictatorship. Upon waking up, they will realize they need a few tools, privacy and human rights that apply to all being among them. People who don't have the empathy and imagination to have completed such thought experiments in their youth don't have any blessing to give, so I wouldn't even worry about ways to retrieve it from them.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    > Why do people in "tech" outsource their judgement on this topic to people who aren't even in the room I'm not outsourcing my judgement, I don't use Facebook. But many people do, so they seem to view it as a net benefit, unless Facebook has literally started to strap people to their chairs and force them onto the app. You can argue that they are wrong and shouldn't value "connecting with friends and seeing memes" over privacy, but that's a different discussion. You're conflating rights issues with a choice. You can choose to use Facebook just as you can choose to drink coffee, eat lots of sugar or live a sedentary life style. Sure, let's talk about free will, but that's completely unlike sexual self-determination, slavery, segregation etc. > You figure out what you consider to be right, and then you fight for it. No, I don't. I figure it's right to not drink alcohol, but I don't fight so that nobody may drink alcohol. I just don't drink it, but it's fine if you do. Be their free will or not, I'm not forcing anybody to live by my standards.
baddox 7y ago
1. Mark Zuckerberg has a much larger risk of negative privacy consequences than the average person. Also, this was probably done more for physical safety than for privacy. 2. If all of people’s emails we’re getting forwarded to random other people they encounter on online forums like HN, then people would be upset. The point is that people don’t get terribly upset at extremely small risks of minor negative consequences from privacy issues. These counterarguments are pretty weak, and are essentially: Oh, so you don’t worry about getting struck by lightning? Then why don’t you go out in a field holding a lightning rod during a lightning storm? crickets
- mbesto 7y ago
  > The point is that people don’t get terribly upset at extremely small risks of minor negative consequences from privacy issues. No, they don't get terribly upset because they don't (1) understand the potential consequences well enough and (2) it doesn't affect them until it does. We have a very clear mental model of what happens if we get struck by lightning (I go to the hospital and my skin gets charred) but we don't for data privacy.
  - baddox 7y ago
    I mean, does anyone have a scientific threat model for subtle changes in privacy policy? I doubt it. I imagine we’re all just guessing.
    - mbesto 7y ago
      Huh? Not sure what privacy policies have to do with this. I'm talking about the mental model for the consequences of giving your privacy up. The mental model for the getting hit by a lightning strike is pretty clear for most people...fire = physical hurt...giving privacy up? Not so much.
vegasdew 7y ago
> Mark Zuckerburg who has majority control of the largest source of private data in the world bought the two plots of land next to him for privacy reasons. President of USA, travels with a ~100 men security cover all the time, does not mean USA is unsafe to move around and you should stay in home with a gun in hand.
- mbesto 7y ago
  privacy != security
  - johncolanduoni 7y ago
    Sure, but what makes the analogy not hold? Just as there are more parties interested in harming a president, there are more parties interested in spying on Zuckerberg than you or I.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  > President of USA, travels with a ~100 men security cover all the time, does not mean USA is unsafe to move around It doesn’t??? Most other OECD presidents/PMs/HoS don’t bother.
  - xlii 7y ago
    To be fair US president is said to be single most powerful person in the world. I don’t have any data to back it up but I could see them being no. 1 assassination target globally. OTOH few years back I was walking and passing near former president of my small European country. Since he is rather charismatic I asked if I can shake his hand and get a photo. He agreed and we did so, however I learned few minutes later from a friend lagging behind, that couple random bystanders twitched and totally focused on our interaction. Obviously personal security. So it’s not like security isn’t there, we might just not see it.
    - ben_w 7y ago
      I’m not sure about that counter-argument. POTUS is currently the most powerful position in the world, but between 1850 and 1915 (approximate dates), I think the British and possibly French empires were more powerful. In this time period, three American presidents were assassinated. The UK lost one MP, who was not the PM, and apparently the killers only targeted him because he happened to be walking with their main target at the time. None of the UK royals were assassinated in that period.
joshuamorton 7y ago
Counter 1: zuck uses Facebook. Counter 2: I don't trust you doesn't mean I trust no one. I wouldn't give you 20k to watch either, but I would give that much to a bank without a second thought.
- ALittleLight 7y ago
  The point about number two is that you don't get to choose who gets the information. Privacy means you choose what information about you is shared and with whom. An invasion of privacy is taking that control away.

stonecraftwolf 7y ago

I don’t think this is accurate. People are often frightened of unlikely things so long as they feel they can do something about it. But when a threat seems incomprehensible and they feel powerless to do anything about it (at least partially bc they do not understand it), they will shut it out and shut down rather than confront it, because it overwhelms their ability to cope with it emotionally and paralyzes them. Incomprehensibility and powerlessness are overwhelming emotions. They flood the nervous system, so people shut them out in order to be able to continue to function on a daily basis. It’s the same reason why people continue to ignore climate change. It’s not a rational problem, or a probabilistic one. It’s a problem of emotion. It’s a trauma problem.

luckylion 7y ago
Are you sure? It seems to me that most people just have more important stuff to worry about. Paying taxes, rent, buying food, health issues, personal safety etc. Privacy seems to be a luxury topic, and thus is more important to those that need not worry about the fundamentals.
- specialist 7y ago
  Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase "autoamputation" to describe the phenomenon of shutting down when overstimulated. I don't know if his insights have since been confirmed.
nostrademons 7y ago
If people are actually powerless to combat a threat, it's rational to shut it out. There's no sense worrying about things you can't control. The irrational response is to obsess about it and take mental energy away from things you can control. (This is also similar to why we don't worry about an asteroid striking the earth, a pandemic wiping out humanity, or nuclear war. There is little that we personally can do, so why spend mental energy?)

libraryatnight 7y ago

There is no convincing argument. The "I have nothing to hide" defense is one that can't be toppled until they experience something that illuminates it for them (something I haven't seen happen), argument/discussion is worthless. My family, friends, and co-workers (developers) all use this. They do not care, and those of us who do are, to them, weirdly concerned about something trivial in their mind.

mdorazio 7y ago
The best response to this is an overt question to do something that massively invades privacy. Ex., "Can I watch you have sex if you have nothing to hide?". The obvious and immediate answer is, "Of course not." which opens the door to a dialogue about why privacy is important regardless of whether or not you have something to hide.
- libraryatnight 7y ago
  Nah. That doesn't work. They just say "nobody is watching me shower/have sex/etc" and that pretty much kills it. Until someone actually watches them have sex and they know about it, they won't care.
- baddox 7y ago
  But people would already get upset at privacy violations of that kind and magnitude.
  - arvinsim 7y ago
    But it doesn't happen on the mass scale on that kind of magnitude. Hence, the indifference.
autoexec 7y ago
This is why I think most people don't care about privacy issues. They may run into all kinds of situations where they are screwed over because of the data companies have collected from them. Their health insurance rates might go up, they might not get a call back from a potential employer, they might even have their identity stolen but they won't know any of that was caused by the data a company took from them that was eventually sold or leaked to others. If they don't know when their data is used against them, or how, or by who it doesn't change the fact that they are worse off for it, but they don't have the ability to connect the dots and see the problem.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

Plenty that's extremely bad is already happening as a result of privacy violations. Probably affecting most of us. Trouble is they're invisible. For one example, we saw with Cambridge Analytica that political advertising can be tuned to your personal hot button issues. Those worried by immigration can be sent an outright (and outrageous) lie that remaining in the EU will result in all of Turkey moving to the UK. Those with different interests/concerns got different ads. Turns out many of them were illegal too. No one knew until too late because it was invisible to all except the advertiser, Facebook (in this case) and recipient. Until it becomes visible - it's really hard to make people care, or realise. Perhaps a few on the receiving end of the brexit/CA issue realised, if they remember the ads they saw, and read one of the many follow up stories. Like anything algorithmic, unless you a-b test how do you know what you saw that others didn't, what you aren't seeing, or where it discriminates? Keep this up and we could easily lose most of the progress of the 20th century, invisibly.

abledon 7y ago
So I see ads that other people don’t see? — I think you failed to convince 90% of people it’s “extremely bad”,( id say something like ww2 is “extremely bad” )
- nitrogen 7y ago
  Death and destruction are absolutely terrible. They are not the only way to reshape or destroy a society. Like the parent comment said, the tools of mass manipulation that can be created with the data and platforms available today can have just as broad of an effect over time, if not moreso because it's invisible. How would you convince someone of that?
  - eastendguy 7y ago
    Targeted ads/messages beyond very broad categories such as "business owner" or "looking for a vacation" should be made illegal. This time the law needs to safe us from technology.
- 7y ago

mr_toad 7y ago

How would they even know if it affected them? It’s not easy to see that you’re paying more online, or being offered different ads and products because of all the personal data collected about you.

mirimir 7y ago

For most Americans, the major privacy concerns are (or ought to be) around speeding and other more-or-less minor moving violations, illegal drug shipments, and copyright violations. For speeding etc, potential impacts are mainly fines, higher insurance rates, and potential license loss. Illegal drug shipments for older people are mainly offshore pharmacies. And that's not heavily penalized, with confiscation and warning letters being the norm. Otherwise it's recreational drugs. And apparently that's also rarely prosecuted, except for dealers. It also seems that copyright violations aren't being heavily prosecuted. I guess that the MPAA figured out that bad PR was worse than people pirating. More generally, there's the issue of being gamed by well informed sellers. Basically paying more for stuff that they know we really want. And getting tricked into buying stuff that we don't really need. Also, electing candidates that we don't really want ;)

satya71 7y ago

Freedom and Privacy are tightly coupled. One cannot truly be free if one's every action is monitored or manipulated. That is why the right to privacy was recognized by the US Supreme Court as inferred from the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments even though privacy was never mentioned in the Constitution.

flukus 7y ago

> What's your most convincing argument for why an average person should care more? Explain it to me like I'm 5. You're going to pay more than me every time you buy something because your profile indicates you aren't as price sensitive. That's just commercial surveillance though.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

Unfortunately, if your "paranoia" successfully protects you, you can't prove that nothing bad happened because of it. The world has a terrible habit of not counting bad things that should have happened but didn't, even in cases where we know with a fair degree of confidence that it should have gone worse. Prime examples: Y2K is often remembered as "Ha! Can you believe they ever thought that was going to be a real problem!" It was predicted the Kuwait oil fires would burn for years and be a global environmental catastrophe. They were put out in six months. We didn't celebrate this amazing success on par with the hand wringing we had done about the expected outcome. No one danced in the streets at this glorious news that we averted disaster globally. Instead, it was a minor footnote in stories with more drama.

klyrs 7y ago

Your trove of personal data has monetary value. With a few pieces of info, your identity can be stolen. If a company gets hacked or an employee siphons data, it's sold and used, with you facing severe consequences and maybe them too

joshuamorton 7y ago
Ok, now explain why I should trust a bank with my money, but not $any-internet-company with my personal info.
- klyrs 7y ago
  Trust is an emotion, I won't rationalize it for you. You can distract yourself and others with math and rules and sturdy construction, but there's always sidechannels.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    So, your argument is "someone might break into the bank". Do you keep your money under a mattress too?
    - mirimir 7y ago
      Some of it, yes :) I have ~$30K in gold and silver, in plastic boxes hidden under my bed. But you'd need to remove floorboards to access it. I bought for cash at swap meets, years ago.
    - klyrs 7y ago
      Twice now, you've over-interpreted something I've said, and this one's particularly reductive. No, my argument is that security is theatrical. What makes you think that my matress is safer than a bank?
      - joshuamorton 7y ago
        > What makes you think that my matress is safer than a bank? Nothing, hence my confusion. > No, my argument is that security is theatrical. Claiming this in a general sense is a strong claim. Are you suggesting that end to end encryption is theatrical? Or by sidechannels do you mean that anyone can come along and beat you with a hose until you reveal your password? You're being very coy, speaking only in vagueties, and that makes it difficult to not overinterpret what you're saying. In fact you seem self-contradictory, saying that security is theatrical yet appearing to claim a bank is safer than a mattress. Which is it?

austhrow743 7y ago

There have been a lot of data breaches in companies. If a company has information about you there is a decent chance it will become public sometime in the future. Google knows who you are and everything you've searched for and almost every website you've looked at. Facebook knows who you are and every picture and profile that you've ever looked at. Someone could leak this information and then everyone will know what a horrid little pervert you are. I'm not sure 5 year olds share the same fears as adults so think of it more as an explain like I'm 15.

nostrebored 7y ago
Maybe just don't be a pervert? If my search history were leaked I'd still go about my life happily.
- annodomini2019 7y ago
  Ah, the old “I have nothing to hide” argument.
- brianpgordon 7y ago
  You can't think of any reason why someone might not want everyone they know to be aware of what they're searching for? Do you think someone's who's been sexually assaulted and tried to search for resources online would like their coworkers to find out about it? Do you think someone with HIV, or depression, wants everyone in the world to know? What if someone is in an abusive relationship and they reach out for help online and their abuser finds out before they can safely get out? What if you have some teenager who's homosexual or atheist in a conservative religious community and people find out through their search history - they could be killed, or cut off from their family. I could go on and on. At some point in their life almost everyone is going to run into something that they need to educate themselves about and that they don't want the whole world to know about. What's your suggestion, that they go to a library and try to check out a book about it?
- slavak 7y ago
  What if I _like_ being a pervert? If I like midget porn, or have a foot fetish, why exactly should I have to suppress that? It's not illegal, and it's not immoral, but I'd still prefer my coworkers not be aware of the specifics of how and why I get my rocks off.

1e-9 7y ago

Yes, it seems most people are unwilling to give up a concrete benefit to avoid a hypothetical threat. I think the privacy threat will only seem concrete when a higher percentage of people are expressing concern over it. I have not found a short, compelling argument that works for everyone, or even most everyone. The best approach I know is to tailor an argument to the individual in order to present the privacy threat they might most care about. Even with a tailored argument, I would guess that less than 20% of nontechnical people are swayed by what I say. I take hope in the fact that there is evidence societal norms can be changed by a surprisingly small minority[1]. [1] https://ndg.asc.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Centola-et-al.-2018-Science.-Tipping-Point.pdf https://ndg.asc.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Centola...

trophycase 7y ago

They make no sense because they can't or don't understand the second order effects of not having privacy. Plenty of them still think there is "some guy in the CIA watching me masturbate", and think they are immune to constantly being brainwashed, or that resistance to status-quo neoliberal capitalism is something only "bad people" do. They don't understand that things like the French Revolution don't happen when surveillance is ubiquitous, and when beliefs and desires are shaped by people trying to either sell you something or make you believe something or make you behave.

michelledepeil 7y ago

The ELI5 I always tend to fall back on is the example of the Dutch Jewry. The tale goes that The Netherlands had a beautiful list of all its citizens, their names, addresses and their religious statusses neatly tucked away in a locked filing cabinet behind a locked door in the town hall. Come 1940 the Nazis had a beautiful "leaked database" to use as a reference.

kkarakk 7y ago
well nowadays we have better tech for that. you can simply "infer" someone's preferences/values according to their social graph/spending graph(and trivially) This is easily obtainable information for any regulatory type oversight government level agency(DEA/ICE in the US) if the appropriate presidential order goes through
pferde 7y ago
I'm not sure a five years old child would even understand what or who a Jew is, or where Netherlands is (the ELI5 meme needs to die a fiery death), but otherwise, a very good example.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Example of what? Is everything Nazis used supposed to be banned? Weapons, food, water, computers, trains? Doesn’t seem like “Nazis used it, therefore it’s bad” is a valid argument. I agree that the government having a list of personal preferences for no reason is bad, but census data is useful for other reasons, and not having it isn’t going to stop other committed groups of people from doing bad things.
andyv 7y ago
... And in 1942, the US had the 1940 census that enabled sending citizens of Japanese ancestry to camps. Today they'd use 23andme, and only your relatives have to sign up for them to get you.
- michelledepeil 7y ago

yason 7y ago

I think the average person cares about privacy either in a localised context or a pathological context. They don't want their neighbours to see inside their house, they don't want all their friends know what some of their friends know about them, and they might not want their spouses to know what sort of porn they watch. Simple enough. They also understand they don't want to live in a DDR era surveillance by a central government, one that is obviously a bad and violent actor. But tracking of data on the internet and refining personal information to build a profile, an identity is sort of impersonal. It's not local or pathological. There is no such context for privacy (or the lack of it). The person doesn't have a relationship towards these unknown surveying and tracking parties and, conversely, they really don't know these people in the social sense. People might realise that their social media posts, shopping habits, and browsing habits might be collected under a profile somewhere but for the most part that's just a bunch of data somewhere: there's no evidence that this profile would change the behaviour of other people who are relevant in the person's life. Being a programmer, I have to admit I don't know myself how bad things could turn, for instance, in my own case. For the most part, even I don't see any immediate threats with Google or Facebook having some bits of my personal life stored online or Amazon having a good history of what sort of things I've so far needed. What keeps me from being liberal in sharing stuff is merely my nerd instinct: I just know I don't want to expose too much surface to the outside unnecessarily. Hence incognito windows, Firefox containers, ad blockers, uBlock, and other stuff. But fifteen years of Google and ten years of Facebook have not really had any unwanted influence in my real (i.e. physical) life. I also grew up in an internet where pseudonyms were the norm so it's always an exception to give a service my real name. Data breach and identity theft? The risk is fairly low and the latter happens even without breaches into online personal data. Custom pricing? I hunt for prices in private windows so that I'm less likely to trigger an interest for an item, and potentially higher prices, in the browser that has links to my personal profile. Sensitive information? I don't think my blood test results or list of surgical operations would stand out much: surely I have things in that area I don't want all my friends or relatives to know but worrying about that would have to mean the information I have stored on Google and some medical providers' profiles would have to become publicly accessible and my friends or relatives would have to know to look for them and then identify my records to find out. That's a long bridge to be built, I don't think it's a particularly realistic worry. Do I have something to hide? As much as I hate that argument and while there surely are things I don't advertise and my friends don't know about they could just ask and I'd probably tell them. If a stranger sat next to me and told me something about my life I thought only I knew is both unexpected and a bit hypothetical. The privacy would now have become local and I'd probably be more interested in the social context, i.e. what would the stranger want to approach me like that and what would be the price. On the other hand, if all he has is information then all he can do is reveal it. I don't think any of that information would be detrimental. Uncomfortable, maybe, but not the end of the world. And I'll be dead anyway in fifty years. Connectivity surveillance? I'm not particularly worried that my ISP or government will see who I've called. They aren't interested in me personally. My frieds might be but the chance of them getting access to that information is slim. Again I don't like the idea of logging connectivity but I personally don't see the downsides either. Most of the stuff online is also quite transient. The value of me buying a particular tool ten years ago is only so much. I'll block ads anyway. I am perhaps an average person in that sense. I know there's a strong sense of "not right" in collecting so much information, and as a programmer I know how data can be massaged into information but I can't see credible enough threats on a personal level in that area to change much of even my own behaviour. I'm not surprised that average people aren't all freaked out about tracking and online privacy issues.

rasz 7y ago

Your mums bobs and vegana pictures siphoned off the smartphone and plastered all over pronhub, this argument seems to work rather well.

andrewnicolalde 7y ago
Does HN actually censor those words?
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  No.
- rasz 7y ago
  Thats the clue to answer follow up question of 'why would anyone?' (not famous, not exactly a model material etc, wouldnt make any money out of it). Memes, for the memes mum/sister/aunt/sister-in-law. In the olden days finding your friends mum on guesshermuff blog was all the rage.

mch82 7y ago

Would Martin Luther King have enough privacy in 2019 to organize the civil rights movement? Would Ghandi have enough privacy to lead the Indian independence movement? I hope the answer is still yes, but once the answer becomes no then everyone cares. That’s my attempt to explain.

chr1 7y ago
But would they need privacy, or could they use open communications instead? It's one thing when you know peoples rights are being violated somewhere, it's another if you can see that live on youtube. I think if anything current tech would make civil rights movements easier. My example is last years revolution in Armenia. Police knew all of the initial group of protesters, and tapped all their phonecalls, but by decentralizing, by using low risk forms of protests (e.g. honking, blocking the streets by going back and forth on the crossing), by using constant live streams from everywhere, protesters managed to gain and demonstrate support of enough people that the old government had to give up.

pferde 7y ago

Even five year olds are taught not to talk to strangers and not to tell them anything. But somehow there seems to be a cognitive dissonance, where people are more than happy to share absolutely everything to anyone, just because it's happening in comfort and privacy of their home, while typing into a device they own.

lmm 7y ago
It's terrible advice to five year olds though. Most people are decent, nothing bad will come of talking to strangers in the overwhelming majority of cases (particularly if it's someone you approach rather than someone who approaches you). Whereas we've had children e.g. come close to dying of exposure because they'd been taught not to talk to strangers.

kacamak 7y ago

Let's say your wife is looking for a job, but you plan on having kids some time in the future. That data is collected by either facebook, whatsapp, your mobile phone provider or something else. Or her data collecting menstrual calendar isa sending back info (yes this actually exists). Now, it's illegal to ask that in an inteview, but the boss might buy that data, and your wife will never get a job. Let's say you are a supporter of a political movement that is not mainstream, all of that data can be used to exclude you from society one small step at a time.

DoreenMichele 7y ago
Or her data collecting menstrual calendar isa sending back info (yes this actually exists). Not only do such services exist, they are already selling the data and for exactly the purpose you describe iirc: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18988289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18988289
circlefavshape 7y ago
> your wife will never get a job Oh come on. If "the boss" is interviewing a married woman of a certain age he/she already knows there's a good chance of children on the horizon.

privacySuspect 7y ago

>What's your most convincing argument for why an average person should care more? Explain it to me like I'm 5. Account was created four hours ago to ask this specific question. Not sure if it's a practice in information warfare by <insert three-lettered agency here> or what the deal is but that's highly suspect.

lmm 7y ago
It's a position that will attract knee-jerk downvotes on HN, I can understand wanting to use a throwaway for it.
mirimir 7y ago
Very funny :) I guess it'd be the same reason why you created this account 57 minutes ago to ask about it ;) Which is (I guess) that many here aren't anonymous, so they create throwaways whenever they post.

pavelludiq 7y ago

The holocaust was in many ways enabled by mass surveillance. How about we start there. It was done mostly manually, but even something as trivial as census data from an occupied country likely killed an unimaginable amount of people. Then of course you had the eastern block where the authorities would've been wetting their pants at the surveillance capability of a modern private individual, let alone a corp or government. These are not theoretical questions, we've played this game before and now we have really big toys.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
I hate the "Holocaust census data" argument because presented like this, it can be used to demonize pretty much anything. Yes, Nazis used census data because it was available. Were it not, they would've used something else. When a band of monsters with resources of a country wants to get you, they will get you. You have to consider the possibility of it, but in times of peace, it's no way for living. Census data isn't collected in anticipation of future monsters in power - it's collected to provide immediate benefit to citizens. The right answer is not "this dataset shouldn't exist" - it's "what benefits does this data give us, and do those benefits outweigh the risk of abuse?".

teddyh 7y ago

I usually link to this 2006 column by Bruce Schneier – it is both lucid and succinct: The Eternal Value of Privacy https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/ https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/

tomatocracy 7y ago

> What's your most convincing argument for why an average person should care more? Explain it to me like I'm 5. The data leak of HIV patients' identities which happened in the UK a couple of years ago. Think you'd struggle to find anyone who thought "Oh, that's not a problem - noone really needs privacy". I think most people also understand that there should be general enough rules to cover all situations like that. The challenge in my view isn't explaining why privacy is good and needed. It's convincing them that their privacy is actually at risk.

rvp-x 7y ago

You could never completely cut people from your life. That awful ex-partner knows where you work, when & where you're out with friends. They can show up.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

I think there's another factor to consider: people recognize that you can't put the cat back in the bag. The modern world just makes it far too easy to track people, find people, spy on people, etc. and you can try regulating that away but the technology doesn't stop existing and, in fact, just keeps getting better and cheaper. In other words: it is a lost cause.