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Comment by something123 | Hacker News Reader

I'm gunna defend the otherside here. As a recent post on HN pointed out, when Google Maps happened people were outraged that you could look into their yards. Same thing with Street-View. Zuckerburg just understands that we're moving into a post-privacy world and they're really pushing the envelope here. For example I think people were outraged by Graph Search, but I think if they were to have released it in 2 years it would have been received differently. People were at first creeped out by Google Now and Amazon Echo, but now most people don't mind.

The thing they should worry about is pushing the envelope too far and too fast. I think for-instance WeChat would have totally destroy Facebook if it weren't for its Chinese-gov't tentacles. It has a much saner privacy model where you only see things from your friends ( not to mention it has a much simpler and nicer interface )

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All of technology's history has recurring themes of distrust. The first Kodak cameras inspired mobs of angry Luddites who smashed people's cameras, especially if people are taking photos of them.

Would you mind terribly if someone snapped a shot of you on their phone without asking? It's for reasons like these that the Japanese government mandates phones sold there make a shutter click sound whenever a photo is taken.

So yes, we do get used to things, generally, but there will always be activities people find off-putting, or creepy.

However, and this could kill Facebook in enough time, people can go "backwards" as much as they can go what the tech industry considers "forward." It could simply come to be that people, enabled by technology that easily encrypts their communication and obscures their actions, get sick of being watched all the time and prefer social networking sites or means of communication that explicitly do not track their users. Right now the global perception of trust is declining in nearly every major institution, and in the eyes of many who do not live in code, Silicon Valley is just one more group of rich elites who claim to make the world a better place but in practice make it more rushed, monitored, and unpleasant, thanks to lauded businesses that sell people's data right back to them.

I'm reminded of the scene in Fight Club when they loot a liposuction clinic to make soap: "Selling those rich women's fat asses back to them."

Japan requires the shutter snap sound as a way to combat a specific kind of unlawful photograph. Specifically upskirt and peephole surreptitious photographs, not to combat photographs of strangers, etc. It addresses a specific problem in their (and in others) society.

Of course that doesn't stop the harcore ones who build homemade cams into their shoes, or people sabotaging the speaker - but if stops most garden variety ones.

> Right now the global perception of trust is declining in nearly every major institution, and in the eyes of many who do not live in code, Silicon Valley is just one more group of rich elites

I'd argue that people who are not intimately familiar with the tech world see the tech as just a set of products that does things for them, with the additional filter of the mainstream media and their friends/family on top of it.

Most people don't know what kind of data is being gathered about them, and they don't care about the implications of that data. To be fair, it is a difficult thing to conceptualize and quantify. Facebook provides a great service to connect with friends and family. The question is - what's the price?

> The question is - what's the price?

I am familiar with the tech world and I keep asking myself this question too. From what I see now, all the data that Facebook collects can hurt me in two ways: more insidious ads, and when used by a superhuman-level AI to infer pretty much anything about me. The AI doesn't seem on the horizon, and the ads don't seem to be that harmful, they're only annoying. There's of course an angle of a dystopian totalitarian government, but in that case we're all screwed anyway; data collected by Facebook or Google will make little difference.

Then there's an insurance angle, but here I have mixed feelings - it seems to me that it's better for an insurer to know more (I for one would like car insurance companies to have real-time centimeter precision location data about every driver, that could restore some sanity on the roads), but not too much. I don't know where I stand on this yet.

Anyway; the way I see it, this whole data-selling business model works mostly because advertisers are stupid enough (or rather, in so tight a competition) to pay for data that won't give them much edge anyway. In a way, it's not users that are the victims here, it's the advertisers.

The data-selling business model is just one aspect of what could be considered harmful, another aspect is the privacy aspect. For example, potential employers looking through your Facebook posts to see what your personal views and social life are like. It's possible to argue that it's possible to limit access to Facebook content, though there are often changes made to Facebook that make such privacy harder to obtain.

So when working out the price of a service like Facebook, it's important to include the cost of privacy (even if this is effectively impossible to put a numerical value on).

Right. I agree parts of this can be put on the "costs" side of Facebook use.

But this aspect isn't basically the issue of publishing? If you post your Facebook status/photos and mark them publicly visible, you're a publisher. Other people can see it. If, however, you limit it to your friends only, then if your non-friend boss sees them it means someone screwed up - which doesn't seem any different than someone gossiping about you in real life.

Anyway, this aspect is something where I think we need to grow up as a society. Your boss probably did (or still does) the same stupid shit that you do, so him making an issue out of that drunk photo of yours is utterly hypocritical. Looking at some things posted by people with status I'm beginning to believe that Facebook is actually helping here - people are getting used to the concept that they're no different than anyone else wrt. weirdness, and that they can be judged by others just like they themselves judge other people. In the face of this, I hope everyone will finally agree to chill out and stop judging one another entirely :).

> "But this aspect isn't basically the issue of publishing? If you post your Facebook status/photos and mark them publicly visible, you're a publisher."

Sure, that's part of it. However, the issue is that Facebook have tried to increase what constitutes public Facebook content over time.

Here are a couple of links about this:

http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/

https://www.eff.org/en-gb/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timelin...

You also have another group of privacy invasions enabled by the phone apps from Facebook:

https://en-gb.facebook.com/help/210676372433246

http://fortune.com/2015/11/09/facebook-photo-scanning/

I'm sure I could find other privacy issues with Facebook. Can you opt-out of all of this? Probably, but it certainly requires vigilance by its users, especially when new features are rolled out.

What does `post-privacy world` even mean? Who decided that that's where we're going and there's no alternative?

I think the assertion is that Joe Public doesn't really care about his/her privacy anymore provided they consent to it's initial release.

It seems to me that over a billion people are fine giving their privacy over to Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/<insert other company> but not necessarily the Government (of any country).

What happens when people's contemporary attitude regarding privacy and government is applied to corporations? Silicon Valley is in a perception bubble: people won't likely be happy with privacy invasions forever.

> "I think the assertion is that Joe Public doesn't really care about his/her privacy anymore provided they consent to it's initial release."

People do care about it, they just don't think about it that often, or only think about people seeing their tamest online behaviour. Here's one recent example of where a privacy policy did capture the public's attention:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/snapchats-new-scary-privacy...

> People do care about it, they just don't think about it that often, or only think about people seeing their tamest online behaviour.

There's also a big difference between not caring and caring, but feeling powerless to actually do anything about it.

For any of these larger privacy issues, most people are powerless to make significant changes. I can't prevent Google from driving its Street View cars by my house. I can't prevent Facebook from making shadow profiles about me. I can't prevent the NSA from conducting mass surveillance, etc.

I'll reiterate a point I believe to be true.

I don't think it's a case of the public not really caring about their privacy, I think it's a case of them not fully understandind exactly what data is collected on them and how it can be used nefariously by companies and by their government.

We in the tech field tend to have an above average knowledge of these things but Joe Public is very ignorant of it.

I believe if people knew exactly what was being collected and how profiles of their entire lives, their thoughts, their actions and their potential thoughts and actions, they would be a lot less happy about it.

The problem is educating people who probably already have enough shit to think about in their own lives and convincing them that this isn't all conspiracy theory.

It's a monumental task.

Progress of technology decided. If you hurry up, you may start putting some social/legal fences but understand that privacy is becoming mostly about what one shouldn't do, and not about what one can't do.

It means that someone who wants to make money off your private information has decided that they are entitled to it.

It means a world where privacy is reserved only for the rich and the powerful.

> we're moving into a post-privacy world

We will never live in a post privacy world. I'm so fucking sick of seeing people say garbage like that.

Exactly. It's as if some are just wishing privacy away as an inconvenience getting in the way of tracking us for advertising revenue.

So what does a post privacy world look like? Should we do away with curtains in our bedrooms? Should we remove the doors from public restrooms?

Why is conflating these two issues defending the other side?

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