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Comment by agentgt | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what bothers people most about the privacy issues?

Strangely I don't care that Google (and others) know about me. I probably should but I have just sorted have accepted the lack of privacy today.

What really bothers me isn't the privacy its them using that data to create a completely unfair advantage to continue the oligopoly that is quickly consuming all markets.

I used to be such a capitalist but as of the last few years watching what companies will continue to do to not just grow but grow exponentially with unfair and unethical leverage in every direction.

I'm curious if others share that feeling or is that just me. Or is it just invasion of privacy?

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At this moment, in your life, for most things you 'dont' care'. But can you conceive of a reasonable period in your life, in the life of another, or at some point when you would care, or when it would be valuable for another to care?

If you can conceive of such a moment, then you must care now as well. Once the switch is flipped it is always on. It will become increasingly difficult to turn off. Just for that moment in which you or someone you care about actually do value their privacy.

I do too.

People tend to want decentralised alternatives partly for privacy, partly for competition, partly for resilience (hurricanes, wars).

Lots of arts people I speak too also talk about cultural diversity - the lack of competition is part of that.

Capitalism has always been regulated. More than 10% of any market used to mean a monopoly. It should still.

There's nothing wrong with capitalism. What's wrong is the weird idea that a democratic state shouldn't/doesn't regulate it to stop extreme outcomes.

I run Redecentralize which is where I've got the needs from http://redecentralize.org/about/

Do you have a reference on that 10% = monopoly definition?

This data stays forever. It will be there in decades.

What if Google tags someone as homosexual and in 50 years, we get a new extremist party that claims that information for a genocide? Google knows a LOT about you. Your weird porn fetishes, your political affiliations, your religion, your beliefs. Your friends, family and THEIR political affiliations.

It sounds impossible but it's not. Take a look at 1960’s Afghanistan to see how a country can really change in a few decades.

Imagine for one second that this goldmine of information existed in 1942. Who can say how 2042 will be...

A good recent example of this is LiveJournal. LJ was bought by a Russian company shortly before the Russian government decided to go all-in on homophobia.

Neither possibility seemed remotely likely during the salad days of LiveJournal in the early 2000's.

The other examples in this thread are useful, but here is another:

Google wants to serve you "effective ads". What does that mean?

It wants to serve you ads that you see and take some new action or think something you didn't before. In other words, Google wants to manipulate you to do things you otherwise wouldn't do.

It is very much in Google's interest that you spend money with its advertisers, think things its advertisers want you to think, and do things that its advertisers want you to do, and in such a way that you don't realize you are doing it.

Do you want to make them better at that?

The entirety of social discourse and information sharing is to influence behavior. Personally, I don't agree with your unstated assumption that having someone else influence your behavior is automatically bad. Hell, you're doing that right now with your comment.

That said, there are plenty of other reasons to value privacy other than not wanting to be served effective ads.

The question here is, "Are Google's advertisers really the ones you want to influence your behavior?"

What interest of yours do they have in mind? What interest of society's?

Well, their interests are to make sure you see ads that are relevant to your interests, because advertisers are only happy if they actually sell whatever it is they're advertising. And on the face of it, seeing content that's relevant to your interests instead of content that's not seems like a good thing for users (completely ignoring for a moment all the scummy ads that prey on fear or ignorance to sell bad products). Speaking personally, if I have to see advertising, I'd rather see advertising that interests me instead of advertising that doesn't. However, I am not willing to sacrifice my privacy to do so.

It bothers me because it can be used against you in the future.

Have you ever searched for information on an ailment that might disqualify you from anything if you actually had it?

Have you ever spoken ill of a government official or policy?

Have you ever visited a location where government dissenters have visited before?

Have you ever searched for a history book about revolutions?

Any of these activities could be shared with other companies or the government and used against you in the future, if things should turn sour. People die in other countries where dissent is not allowed. Is there a reason you trust your future life to a marketing company in the present?

If we accept the small invasion of privacy now, and accept it as the norm, what are the implications for the future?

It doesn't really bother me if the internet knows that I recently bought a nice soldering iron on Amazon or that I play D&D with my friends. I kinda view the internet as public and I don't really have huge privacy concerns about information I put in public.

Other people have legitimate concerns about others knowing what they bought on Amazon or do with their friends. In some jurisdictions, buying what seem like normal products to you and I is illegal. Some people live in areas where others knowing they are gay, transgendered, conservative, atheist, etc. will get them fired or literally killed. It's great that you don't have to worry about that. But others do, and it's getting to the point where, "Then just don't use the internet" is simply not possible. Even, "Then just don't use Google's services" is impossible when their ads and tracking are on literally half of the top 1 million sites on the internet.

That's fair but I don't think that how other countries react to what people do in public it should affect how companies act in mine. Ovarall yt's hard because it's unreasonable to expect someone to just not use internet services that are so convenient but it's also unreasonable to expect companies to ignore all this lucrative data that we are literally giving to them. Currently it's a Catch 22 that I've made my peace with but I understand if other people haven't.

The problem is, you're not making a transactional choice. You're not just choosing the internet for you, you're affecting the internet for everyone.

I also think assuming that you know this can't hurt you yourself is naive, but it's just easier to point to people in more vulnerable spots.

Yeah. One of the promising things about the internet, very early on, is that it gave people communities that they couldn't have in the real world because they lived in areas hostile to gays, or trans people, or... It's hard not to wonder if we're going backwards sometimes.

I remember when large swaths of the Christian communities around me (and the one I was a member of) condemned D&D for 'causing' Satanism. There was serious paranoia going. Actual Jack Chick level fears: https://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0046/0046_01.asp

It's not entirely implausible that, within your lifetime, your country's leadership takes a turn to conservative Christianity, and the mere fact that you actually bought D&D material will have some negative consequence.

Now obviously in this case I wouldn't worry about it, but I'm just trying to point out that even something as 'innocent' (to us) as D&D is considered actively dangerous by a non-significant group of people who are also generally more comfortable with imposing their views on others (because it's not theirs but Gods).

One thing that took me a while to understand is that the problem is not primarily that your behavior is essentially public, but rather that it's recorded and stored 'forever'.

People that are politically interesting (for states and others) have obvious reasons to protect their privacy. You need politically interesting people to fight for your rights.

You want to protect your privacy so that in the event that you become politically interesting, they don't have a backlog of your data. Furthermore, you want to protect your data to not be dissuaded from any (even subtle) actions that you might take if you weren't affected by a chilling effect.

You want any person who hasn't been previously cognizant of the dangers of privacy to not have that hang over his head, in case he becomes politically interesting (even not on purpose, like could be the case with whistleblowers), or become politically interesting, like an activist, journalist, etc. Any free society needs this. To do this, everyone needs to have privacy.

Finally, even for the first group to have privacy, everyone has to have it. It's not something you can just give to specific people.

I'm assuming you know that there are plenty bad things can be done with data, if someone is willing. I hope that's evident. Not mentioning what criminals could do with it, or how corporations can abuse people with it. As they routinely do.

Yes, I'd like to see some good (not-too-hypothetical) examples of the bad things that could happen to a person because of privacy invasion. Perhaps in the accessible form of a movie (so it can spread more easily). Any references welcome.

States have and will routinely harass and otherwise dampen the efforts of activists, dissidents, even journalists. I think examples of that are easy to find. Furthermore, they can't really have good privacy unless everyone does.

For a general case of the harms of privacy invasion, I recommend reading relevant chapters off of Schneier's Data and Goliath. Brilliant book.

Don't understand why it bothers you. Big corporations have unfair advantage either way. Small players already need some special treatment to level the field.

But privacy is more about power and governments getting access to the data companies collect is the worst thing that could happen.

> Don't understand why it bothers you. Big corporations have unfair advantage either way. Small players already need some special treatment to level the field.

So to make it fair we should give small players special treatment while continuing to have big corps have no restrictions.

Which small players get to receive the treatment? Why not make it simpler and have more restrictions on big corps?

> But privacy is more about power and governments getting access to the data companies collect is the worst thing that could happen.

I'm not sure I follow what you are saying. These companies at this point are bigger and more powerful than most countries below the G8. I have exactly the concern you are mentioning.

While people generally like that google, apple, fb don't give data to the US government I can see it equally bad that they keep it to themselves and use it to leverage the government (they are already doing it with money).

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