5 ms·

I don't care about privacy for my personal (not corporate) information from Google. The worst they can do is disconnect me, and I can always leave them. I do c

• rayiner 13y ago
  > The worst they can do is disconnect me, and I can always leave them. No, the worst thing that Google,[1] can do is share that information with credit card companies, HR departments, health insurance companies, etc, who do have the power to ruin your life and are much more likely to do it than the government. What happens when the advertising money hits the wall and can't support revenue growth sufficient to keep the Wall Street analysts happy? At some point some MBA is going to figure out that HR departments would love to be notified about e.g. their employees joining say a cancer support page. It sounds inconceivable today, but I bet people who started using credit cards in the 1960's and 1970's never expected that one day the various credit organizations would band together and sell your information to literally everyone, so that you could be denied a job because of your credit history. I think it's important to keep some perspective, and I feel like people on HN aren't doing that here when they direct all their blame to the government over this issue and hold Google, Facebook, etc, who created this surveillance apparatus, blameless. Corporate America is much more likely to screw you over than the government. They have a profit motive to do so, and can get away with screwing you over on a mass scale in a way the government cannot. I don't know a single person who has been screwed over by the government. I do know people who have been screwed over by credit ratings agencies, having job offers revoked because they struggled financially in college. Maybe it's not inevitable or even very likely that Google and Facebook will sell your information to the highest bidder. But it's a failure of imagination not to pretend that it isn't possible, and if we're going to engage in slippery slope reasoning with respect to the NSA, let's be intellectually honest and admit that we've built a vast surveillance apparatus in both the public and the private sector, and there are numerous entities within both sectors who have the ability and perhaps the motive to use that information to hurt you. [1] Or Facebook or whatever. It doesn't matter. One day these companies will become mature and will be headed by some MBA who has never written a line of code...
  • unimpressive 13y ago
    >I think it's important to keep some perspective, and I feel like people on HN aren't doing that here when they direct all their blame to the government over this issue and hold Google, Facebook, etc, who created this surveillance apparatus, blameless. Yes. The only reason the NSA/etc/all has this data is that people (probably a lot like you, dear reader) built these popular systems that make their money from tracking users. Worse still, they will always beat out a paid service because of friction and network effects. We didn't just stand by and watch the creation of this situation, we actively participated.
  • danenania 13y ago
    Collusion among private corporations is scary, but it's not as scary as totalitarianism, mass imprisonment, and genocide. The precedents set for what governments end up doing once they get their hands on this level of social control are very bleak.
    • rayiner 13y ago
      The amount you should reasonably be worried about something happening is the probability of the event multiplied by how bad that event would be. Government gone totally off the rails would be much worse, of course, but corporations going off the rails is much more likely. How many liberal democracies can you point to that have gone the way of totalitarianism, mass imprisonment, and genocide? I don't see a lot of examples around. Yet I can look around and see tons of examples of corporations doing evil things with your information (health insurance companies dropping coverage when you get sick, credit card companies sharing credit history for any purpose other than setting interest rates, etc). I think things you can see examples of every day are generally much more worthy of your worry. Or at the very least, it's not rational to be so worried about government surveillance while giving a free pass to the companies creating a surveillance apparatus that can be abused by corporations.
      • sdkmvx 13y ago
        > How many liberal democracies can you point to that have gone the way of totalitarianism, mass imprisonment, and genocide? How many 200 year old liberal democracies can you point to? There's no historical data to look at. This history of the United States itself is an indicator that democracy is self-defeating. Compare the amount of classical liberalism in 1800 and 2000. Whether that can continue past the middle and into full-blown totalitarianism is untested. > It's not rational to be so worried about government surveillance while giving a free pass to the companies creating a surveillance apparatus that can be abused by corporations. It's also not rational to give the government a free pass. Don't think that companies can collude with each other. The government can also collude with companies, as PRISM indicates that they have been doing.
• wwweston 13y ago
  > If not Obama, someone at the head of the table is going to abuse this information one day. I'd worry less about someone at the head of the table -- who has a lot of visibility and responsibility -- and more about the legion of prosecutors and officers (plus their friends they owe favors to) who all have incentives to catch bad guys... whether they're actually bad, or just barely find themselves on the wrong side of an interpretation of some statute, or just fit the profile. And of course, the occasional less duty-oriented reasons for making your life difficult.