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Comment by the_watcher | Hacker News Reader

> That's not a company whose products I want to use anymore. Not for email. Not for search. Not for a thermostat. Not for a realtime JSON database. And not for listening in to all the data in my house.

While I can't say I disagree with your point on Google's incentives being exactly the opposite of absolute privacy, you're clearly in a tiny, tiny minority. Even assuming that the majority of users simply aren't aware of this (which is a faulty assumption in my opinion), there are many (myself included) who have simply accepted this and go about our lives, preferring to have a simpler, easier to use life than obsess over every single privacy concern.

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I'm guessing you were born after the Berlin Wall came down, and missed all of the palpable Western demonstrations of just how fragile freedom is, and just how dangerous it would be to build a turn-key surveillance state.

In my experience, the people who "don't care" (as opposed to simply not understanding the insanely complex topic) are the people who:

1) benefit from it, e.g., SaaS/startups heavy on analytics, and

2) lack the context to understand that the current state of Western civilization is not in any way immune to regression, and

3) don't understand how their own actions can in fact induce that regression by creating a high-value turn-key totalitarian system ready for the taking, and

4) don't understand that their actions are already serving this purpose in more totalitarian states outside of the USA.

That's even ignoring the implications of __massive__ information asymmetry when it comes to negotiation between corporations and individuals.

You think you care, but you have no idea who gives you privacy. Maybe you trust Apple, but have you seen their code? What if snarfing your data leads to better data for siri? Then let's not talk about the millions of small sites snarfing your data as you browse through the web, none of them beholden to sarbanes-oxley, your cell phone conversations which are snarfed by your carrier and aggregated with geo data and sold to the highest bidder, providing billboard locations that maximize demographics. You say you care about privacy, but you have no idea that you have no privacy. You may hate google / think you're maintaining your privacy by warning people about google, but it's just the beaten horse that you beat to make you feel better. It's the bright colorful logo in your face that you see, but that's the tip of the ice berg. In short you are ignorant and lashing out and making no difference whatsoever. Google's just easy to attack because it's more up front regarding how it uses your data, you can login to your dashboard and see everything. Your cell phone carrier and friends, Apple, not so much. Don't remember seeing their dashboards with the data they collect on you. So, continue on pretending like you are making a difference.

This is the best comment on this topic I've read to date.

I agree with everything you say and I still do business with Google. Let me go through your list.

1. No. Not me.

2. I hope I'm not that naive. I've made similar arguments to other people in related discussions.

3. Yep. I understand this.

4. Also true.

So - I understand those things and agree with you and I still do business with Google et al.

The thing is I also drink, fail to exercise, drive a petroleum-consuming vehicle and recycle poorly.

I do many other things that harm myself directly or perpetuate or accelerate trends in society I perceive as negative.

You might consider this apathy and that is probably true to some degree.

But I am also running a continual cost/benefit calculation on every action I perform.

Some of my conclusions are out of whack and some are frankly irrational but the list of things I consider every moment of every day is extremely long and I've decided that the cost vs benefit of doing business with Google is in my favour. I've evaluated the costs you set out above and decided they fall far enough down my list that I'll tackle them at some point after I've started jogging and voting, stopped drinking scotch and begun regularly volunteering at my local worthy cause.

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