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Comment by tdb7893 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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'.

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