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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

I wish people cared.

After many years in this industry I've personally come to the conclusion that nobody actually cares about security, privacy, or data ownership. People say they do but they are lying, as evidenced by the fact that they do not change their behavior. People gripe about security and privacy but continue to use "free" surveillanceware/spyware and continue to migrate everything to cloud hosts they don't control.

The only thing people care about in reality is convenience and user experience, and they're obviously willing to give up an almost unlimited amount of personal privacy and control to get those things.

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One point is that you often don't really hear about the people who care enough to avoid much "social media" and cloud services... because they're avoiding many of the tools by which they might talk about it. They're also relatively uncommon, and if your friend group pretty much requires use of social media tools to stick together, you're not going to find them.

At the moment, I use GMail, IRC, a Matrix server I set up for my hackspace, a couple of niche forums, and a niche social network. I'm in the process of organising some hackspace servers to provide email hosting, so hopefully I'll be able to switch off of GMail at some point. The next step after that would be some form of cloud file hosting.

I'm not overly privacy-conscious though - I've used Tor once to see what the fuss is about, and I don't have AdBlock or NoScript installed. But at least I avoid explicitly putting my data in the hands of companies I have no control over as much as possible.

I have a similar situations. In a hackerspace I manage, we're still using GMail and Google Docs for collaboration. We're slowly moving to self-hosted services, like OwnCloud, but we can only do that because we're an established group of people. Back when the space was forming, there was no one willing to shoulder the sysadmin responsibilities for managing all the tools we needed to start and grow the organization.

What we need is separation of virtual machines from the code they run. Exchangable backends, if you like. We should be able to use cloud tools like e.g. Google Docs while also being able to choose our own backend - whether this or that cloud, or even our own servers. Right now, instead of running someone else's code on our data (as it is with files and local work), we're giving third parties our data for them to run the code for us.

You're pretty much describing Sandstorm, for the record. Have you had a play with it?

Not yet. Will have to schedule some time for it.

We don't need all people to care, only those who can make a difference. We have the technology to build privacy-enforcing versions of popular services. We can make them better, faster, and stronger. We could create new, fun, and interesting things as well! What is lacking is the coordination and funding to compete properly.

The real question is, how do we fix that?

> I wish people cared.

I wish too, but this is a moot point - everyone has a shit ton of things to care about in their adult lives. By the time we're done putting out fires at work, dealing with mortgage, bills, grocery shopping, sick parents, broken sinks, searching for a good school for our kids, etc. there's precious little care left to be given. Greedy and socially destructive cloud/SaaS business practices are a distant position on a long list of things to care about, so you can't say that "if people don't care about something then it means they're ok with that". It only means the issue isn't immediately pressing/dangerous enough to warrant prioritizing it.

It sounds like that might be a reaction to the lack of obvious repercussions of giving up privacy and security. What tangible harm does the average person come to by giving up privacy, security, and data ownership?

I think it's more about immediate impact.

Will I be hurt today if I put my data on someone else's cloud? probably not. Will I 10 years from now? possibly, but by then, my brain will have disassociated those two.

You don't necessarily sacrifice those when choosing a third party. We all apparently work in related industries...do you and your colleagues sit around and dream up ways to exploit customers? I don't, nor do those I work with.

I don't think anyone does. Its rarely a thought-out malice. It's more of unexpected things that happen because no one thought or cared to safeguard against that, or because such safeguards would've broken some legit feature or business model.

Like that E2E vs spam filtering issue explaination from GMail engineers.

Somebody does, apparently, otherwise business models would be much more straightforward. I worked in a social media marketing, "let's take an EU grant and spin off random shitty SaaS to bolster our marketing platform" company. I could see people in charge inventing new and great ideas for "bringing in value" without noticing (in any apparent way) that those ideas were mostly literally shitting on the users to make a quick buck. Reality distortion field? Sociopathic tendencies? Call it what you want, but it does happen, and that's where most of the "brilliant" business models come from.

Why do you wish people cared? I don't care and I'm perfectly happy with that.

Because not caring for the issue has adverse effects in society.

It's not about individual happiness.

To give an extreme example, there are people who don't care about police violence. While they are might fine, and probably wont ever have to suffer it, the resulting society is worse than if they cared.

> Because not caring for the issue has adverse effects in society.

Ok, but people obviously don't think the issue is that big since the majority doesn't care.

So? The majority didn't care for slavery either (if it wasn't in favour of it).

Whether the majority (or a minority) merely likes something is not a justification for it.

As to whether its not harmful, just, etc, that requires argumentation and further inquiry.

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