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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Why should I care? For most of human history, most people lived in villages. Everyone they met would know this kind of information about them ("it's obvious to everyone except the couple themselves that x and y are into each other" is a literary trope for a reason). People survived, thrived even - in fact there's a strong argument our psychological welfare was much better in those conditions than it is in anonymous cities.

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Interesting viewpoint.

The difference is that in the village case, the information distribution was much more symmetric. People knew about you and you knew about them, and you knew about each other's knowledge and presumably acted accordingly. So for instance, if being gay was going to be a problem in your village, you hid it well.

With Facebook, they have all the information about you, and you don't even know what they know about you. So in the best case scenario, you are hoping that they are going to be a "benevolent dictator" with their asymmetric knowledge, and not exploit you.

> Everyone they met would know this kind of information about them

Everyone in the village would have had detailed spending habits, knowledge of every website browsed, media preferences, political views, porn habits, location history and more all backed up in giant databases that are easily search-able?

Spending Habits: Yes - you could easily observe what your village neighbors are buying.

Websites Browsed/Media Prefs/Porn Habits: No, these things didnt exist for most of human history. I guess "Media Preferences" would be known if we're talking books vs. newspaper.

Political views: Yes, assuming the person isn't a hermit.

Location History: Yes, presumably you'd know where village-mates are/have been.

Backed up in a database that's easily searchable? I guess that depends on how good your brain is at remembering things.

Not trying to nitpick too hard, but all your viable examples listed are in fact things your fellow villagers would know about you in a close-knit community.

I'm going to highly disagree with you.

Yeah, you might have a rough idea of spending habits for a handful of people, but not everyone, and not to the same detail.

Books/newspapers/etc sure, you'd know some of it, but you wouldn't have a record of what they consumed in their home unless they told you.

You might know some of their political views, but only the ones they share openly.

If a co-villager wandered off for a week, you wouldn't likely have any idea where they went. You'd have to rely on what they told you, and where others said they went, which isn't necessarily accurate. Additionally, you wouldn't get the level of detail FB can.

No brain is capable of storing even half of the location that FB's DB can. I don't care how good someone's memory is.

They would know some of the above sure, but it'd be at a high level, and not nearly as accurate.

You make some good points, but i have to slightly disagree with some of them :)

"Yeah, you might have a rough idea of spending habits for a handful of people, but not everyone, and not to the same detail."

The shopkeeper does. And as someone who grew up in a small town, the gossip is real.

"ou might know some of their political views, but only the ones they share openly"

Facebook doesnt know my political views? Though I dont openly share them on fb. More to avoid flamewars.

"If a co-villager wandered off for a week, you wouldn't likely have any idea where they went"

Depends how well you know them. You might know they like that spot by the lake for example. And if I leave my phone at home, no one would know where I went.(which sounds like a good reason to carry my phone, safety)

There's a big difference between your neighbours knowing all your secrets, and Facebook knowing all your secrets. And I think which you find worse says something about you.

People who care more about what the neighbours think, might consider the village having access to all their behaviour a bigger problem than some distant, faceless corporation.

For people who care about power imbalance, a single corporation knowing everything about everybody is much more serious than people in villages knowing about their neighbours.

People wouldn't mind as much if they had the same kinds and amounts of data on the their observers as their observers have on them.

I kind of work in this field, and it's easy to know a lot more about a stranger than they know about themselves. Given the law of large numbers, I can make lots of accurate predictions of a person's future behavior, and I'm not amazingly smart. I'm also careful to not spy on people because that's just creepy. But, I'm certain that there are people out there using similar types of data who are 1) way smarter than me, 2) creepy, and 3) devious.

(BTW, the data that I use has all PII removed, but it's trivial to identify individuals, if one is motivated)

https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8034-build_your_own_nsa#video&t=...

It is really easy to identify a majority of users of such a dataset.

Coming from a small city in the country, I can tell you this is exactly reason #1 why people leave the small village for the anonymous big city: privacy. BTW people are often wrong on their assumptions, data is usually not.

And they were making money of it and selling the information to to everyone that wants to pay for it. Exactly like in a small village /s .

The "everyone" that you speak of was scoped for the village. And that "everyone" was not a specific someone.

[& p.s. your anonymity and privacy shot up as soon as you stepped away from your village.]

* The Stasi were terrifying enough in a non-networked age - with smartphones, facebook, etc. they'll have so much more data on us.

* IMHO the political climate we live in could easily produce another Stasi within a generation.

* If that we get something like that again they'll have a decade or more information on you, and information you are leaking right now could be used to coerce, blackmail and threaten you.

Does accuracy of information really make a difference there? The Stasi were terrifying because they had no accountability - you could be taken away in the middle of the night on a whim, or because a disgruntled neighbour had accused you of treason. A Stasi who had accurate information about who was opposing the state would in some ways have been less terrible.

I grew up in a community legally titled "village" (<400 people at the time); digging into your neighbors lives for any topic was highly frowned upon.

It's almost as if social norms have changed since the days of tight knit hunter-gathering, wicker shanty peoples roamed the Earth.

Shocking.

In a country where having the "wrong bumper sticker" gets people driven off the road, or riding my bicycle nearly sees me pushed into parked cars by folks driving lifted Dodge Rams, your ideas make little sense.

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