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Comment by int_19h | Hacker News Reader

Allow me to rephrase this entire debate in terms that might sound more familiar.

Point: Locked doors and a shotgun under the bed is not a solution to the violent crime problem. We also need laws, and police to enforce them.

Counterpoint: Locked doors and a shotgun under the bed is absolutely a solution to the violent crime problem. You can't rely on laws, because they can easily go away with a stroke of the pen.

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Most of us: I lock my doors and might have a gun just in case, but I recognize the value and role of laws. In the real world we have to accept that we need to defend ourselves, and also act collectively through politics and law to protect each other.

And yet anyone who says crime is not a problem worth fixing because we have guns will be laughed out of the room.

And that's despite crime being a very hard problem to fix. The privacy problem we're talking about here is actually trivially fixable with legislation alone.

Actual most of us: I let Google and Facebook rummage through my underwear and dick pics in exchange for 50 cents worth of free server usage a month. I also stare at hours of advertising a week to get free TV.

I won't deny that FB has a huge userbase, but no, that's still not most of us. In addition, broadcast tv isn't shitting the bed because people aren't tired of the deal you've described; they're just cutting the cord.

Locked doors and a shotgun fails when a) the perpetrators have more guns than you and b) when your shotgun "misfires" and causes more damage than the threat.

But it's a false dichotomy. We need (the rights to have) both. Defense in depth.

Exactly, it's not a dichotomy. But the first point doesn't present it at one - it doesn't claim that VPN is not useful for defense in depth, only that it's not the solution.

The counterpoint is the one that sets it up as a dichotomy of sorts - that you don't need regulations, because the things that you can do on your own are sufficient.

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