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Comment by nitrogen | Hacker News Reader

...who are we to say you shouldn't be able to make your own choices.

Externalized costs complicate the libertarian approach.

Externalized costs would make tons of entire industries completely unviable. We as a society completely ignore them when it comes to business for a reason. It's shitty, and usually at the expense of our long term sustainability, but good luck changing it.

What are the externalized costs of running software that violates your privacy?

For starters, it often forces others to run the same software and allows privacy-violating corporations to earn more than responsible corporations.

That is a really extreme definition of externalized costs in my view. No one is literally forced to run the same software as someone else.

By extending the definition of 'force' to include 'being inconvenienced' we cheapen and muddy an important concept. Asking your colleague to convert a Word doc to a different format is inconvenient. But forcing compliance for something via fines, jail time etc. - essentially at gunpoint - is a much more serious affair, even if the person being forced is the CEO of one of those evil privacy-violating corporations.

If you draw the line that far away from sanity then, really, non-smokers aren't forced to breathe foul air (they must simply inconveniently hold their breaths and stay inside), poorer children aren't forced by drivers using leaded gasoline to have brain damage (they are simply inconvenienced by having to be born into a richer family), and illegal overfishing doesn't force other fishers to overfish to compete and eventually collapse the ecosystem.

Your appeal to worse problems[0] does not invalidate any of the problems with privacy violations we are discussing here.

Here's a better definition of externalized costs in the form of force: any behavior which, when engaged in by a company, causes other companies' or users' life options to be reduced (even if just by increasing inconvenience of safer/healthier/more private options), or which when practiced by a plurality leads to a net negative result for society at large, is an action resulting in externalized costs.

What is your horse in the race?

[0] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as

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