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Comment by roflchoppa | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that the more "advance" technology gets, the lower our reasonable expectation of privacy becomes.

I want to know when the average person gets on a computer, and surfs around, what data do they expect is kept for just themselves vs shared with the service.

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I don't think the "average person" even thinks about data privacy at all.

I've seen people tell other people to "get off MY feed!" as if it's a thing they own and can control. As long as the platform can maintain this illusion, everyone will be happy.

thats a good point, also interesting that people get territorial over digital space.

> get off MY feed!

shitposting on public facebook posts is a lot of fun

I think it's because of the common assumption that the system that controls your data must also house the application that interacts with this data. When decentralized applications finally arrive (the inklings are already here) users won't be forced into this false choice. In that sense, companies like Google and Facebook are behind the curve, and don't really represent technological "advancement", but rather a social shift that has legitimized itself by falsely presenting itself as inevitable.

You just touched upon one of my idealistic geek wet dreams: Truly decentralized applications. Let's use ondemand music streaming as an example. I dream of a network where I pay whatever vendor I want, to deliver streams of music. I also pay whatever vendor I want to save my data (think playlists and play data). And I pay whatever vendor I want (could be free software as well) to play those streams. Each component does one thing, and the communication between is documented and open sourced. If I decide to switch player, that is fine, perhaps I use a different player on my phone and on my rpi terminal. If decide to switch stream provider my data is not locked with the previous vendor.

That's some idyllic thinking, but I agree such interoperability would be awesome. However, I don't see how it could be realized with current closed ecosystems. Seems like this would almost require open software...

I wouldn't say open source. But well-defined inter-operation protocols and strong encryption, yep.

The pipe command for services. I can dig that.

    s/advance/convenient/

Expectation doesn't become less. But awareness of implications does. People aren't easily digesting realities of digital space. Abusing this lack of awareness and making it look like lower expectation of privacy is evil (and some clearly try to do that, to justify their breaches of others' privacy).

It's really a cultural (judicial?) shift that is immensely reluctant to apply the traditional standards of public interest (of which privacy is a sub set) to new technology.

The continued expansion of IP rights and copyright extension is part of the same shift.

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