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it's interesting how many people think paying with your privacy costs nothing.

Barrin92 7y ago
completely serious question, what does it cost me? It's not like my data is some zero sum thing that vanishes once someone else has it, and it's not like I have the ability to directly sell it to anyone else. How in material terms am I worse off by anyone tracking me. Isn't this all just entire ideological, I don't see what cost I incur if Google knows that I visited hackernews, listen to bowie on youtube and like podcasts
- feanaro 7y ago
  Google and a few other gigantic corporations are clearly aiming for a much larger power grab in the future, with their own money, hardware, complete control of the software stack, the web, messaging, transport, etc. In this future, a corporation becomes indistinguishable from a government and this is the long term cost. It's hard to see if you're only paying attention to immediate cost on the scale of a year or few.
- fromthestart 7y ago
  The cost is the risk of someone using your data against you in the future, against your will. For example, even seemingly benign page visits, like apolitical YouTube videos and shopping data can probably be combined with location history to infer political affiliation with good accuracy with some basic machine learning. That kind of data only needs to be collected once, and it's out there forever. Now imagine the wrong authoritarian party gains access to such data in 5 or 10 years, and now knows that you've spent your life going to church and watching gun videos, or that you visited a planned Parenthood clinic and listened to a strongly liberal artist.
lukevdp 7y ago
Curious, what does it cost?
throw2016 7y ago
Privacy in an individual context is irrelevant and only leads to folks glibly claiming they don't care about their privacy. Its like saying I personally doesn't care about the environment. That context and framing is wrong and misleading. Privacy has a value on a one to one basis. That's why no one is going to give you their phone, yet they will make dissonant statements online. And privacy has a far higher value on a societal basis for a democratic society. Surveillance capitalism is anti-democratic, hugely abusive and solely for the profit of a few. These are bad actors. That's why societal rule of law needs to kick in but as we know money and greed creates its own logic so that may take time. And till then there will be no shortage of apologists with a vested interest in surveillance trying to 'normalize' it.

completely serious question, what does it cost me? It's not like my data is some zero sum thing that vanishes once someone else has it, and it's not like I have the ability to directly sell it to anyone else. How in material terms am I worse off by anyone tracking me. Isn't this all just entire ideological, I don't see what cost I incur if Google knows that I visited hackernews, listen to bowie on youtube and like podcasts

feanaro 7y ago
Google and a few other gigantic corporations are clearly aiming for a much larger power grab in the future, with their own money, hardware, complete control of the software stack, the web, messaging, transport, etc. In this future, a corporation becomes indistinguishable from a government and this is the long term cost. It's hard to see if you're only paying attention to immediate cost on the scale of a year or few.
fromthestart 7y ago
The cost is the risk of someone using your data against you in the future, against your will. For example, even seemingly benign page visits, like apolitical YouTube videos and shopping data can probably be combined with location history to infer political affiliation with good accuracy with some basic machine learning. That kind of data only needs to be collected once, and it's out there forever. Now imagine the wrong authoritarian party gains access to such data in 5 or 10 years, and now knows that you've spent your life going to church and watching gun videos, or that you visited a planned Parenthood clinic and listened to a strongly liberal artist.

lukevdp 7y ago

Curious, what does it cost?

throw2016 7y ago

Privacy in an individual context is irrelevant and only leads to folks glibly claiming they don't care about their privacy. Its like saying I personally doesn't care about the environment. That context and framing is wrong and misleading. Privacy has a value on a one to one basis. That's why no one is going to give you their phone, yet they will make dissonant statements online. And privacy has a far higher value on a societal basis for a democratic society. Surveillance capitalism is anti-democratic, hugely abusive and solely for the profit of a few. These are bad actors. That's why societal rule of law needs to kick in but as we know money and greed creates its own logic so that may take time. And till then there will be no shortage of apologists with a vested interest in surveillance trying to 'normalize' it.