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Comment by CivilianZero | Hacker News Reader

Try as I might, I just can't be bothered to care if someone wants to know what I've been buying so they can show me advertisements relevant to my interests.

But I'm weird, I don't think advertising is inherently evil or annoying.

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To be honest, I don't either. But the data is still there. You don't know if in ten years Google is going to start losing money and is forced (by its shareholders) to find alternative means of monetization.

You can't really say Google is perfectly secure and will never ever ever be hacked and leak your data either. Maybe it will never happen, maybe it will.

Therefore I believe I should have the right to say "hey, I don't want this private corporation to have my credit info".

Or potentially worse, if they're compromised/hacked in some way and that data simply enters the wild ecosystem.

I still can't see why I should care if some stranger has my purchase history.

I suppose some people might feel weird letting strangers or anyone know what they buy, but that's an argument for the ability to opt-out, not for filing a complaint with an agency or starting a lawsuit.

There's plenty of people who get up to things that would result in severe professional damage if it became public knowledge - I know a handful of teachers who are into BDSM in their private lives who are eternally terrified of their employers or a journalist catching wind. "Some stranger" isn't necessarily the issue, it's someone who has the ability to harm you that's the issue.

Or look at the short term Mozilla CEO that was ousted over a public outcry regarding similar private matters.

Edit: Hrmf, never mind. Egg on my face.

Publicly-disclosed (by legal mandate) financial sponsorship of a public advocacy campaign on a public policy matter is about as far as you can be from a “private matter”.

Hrmf, did i get my CEOs confused. Could have sworn there was some BDSM stuff involved as well. Or was that some other FOSS project?

> Could have sworn there was some BDSM stuff involved as well.

Well, not with Eich. I don't think there was another short-term Mozilla CEO ousted among public controversy.

ISTR participation in Gor fandom being brought up alongside sexual harassment/abuse claims for a prominent community figure (maybe Jacob Applebaum? I thought it was him, but I don't see that element mentioned in any of the articles on him, so it may have been someone else) but I don't remember that or consensual BDSM related activity being the central concern in any ouster.

EDIT: As a sibling comment suggest, the Gor issue was with Larry Garfield.

The only well-known techie BDSM stuff I know of was not a CEO - it was Larry Garfield of the Drupal community.

I find that to be an awkward form of argument because any category that is sufficiently taboo is going to split the audience into two camps-- a small group who empathize with the practitioners and a larger group who don't. (Otherwise it wouldn't be a taboo.)

The problem at hand is that Google and others are scooping up everyone's data. A change in the way these companies decide to use that data can have an effect on everyone's lives, but without anything like a Congressional Budget Office or public debate to gauge whether the benefits of those changes outweigh the costs for the people who are affected.

I'm certainly not as clever as most thieves but if you had a database of people's purchases I imagine there's some low hanging fruit if you run a query looking for people purchasing lots of valuables, with no security related purchases, and a consistent pattern of taking a vacation out of state every year.

It really depends on what's in your purchase history, where you live what, job you have, that kind of thing. I certainly wouldn't want to coming out I enjoyed a drink every now and then in Saudi Arabia, and I might want to hide my propensity to smoke cannabis from my boss. Finally there's just the notion that I might not want to be relentlessly marketed to by increasingly sophisticated algorithms, because sometimes it works and people end up buying things they wouldn't otherwise. As these techniques get better I'm sure that will continue to be a problem which only grows, and the data harvested today isn't going anywhere.

Do you want it to be sold to your insurance company? We see that you're a regular coffee drinker which is correlated with increased risk of heart problems -- here's a rate increase.

Maybe we'll get universal healthcare at some point and people will stop rolling out this tired argument.

Okay, how would you like your purchase histories to be used to determine your wealth and companies charge you more for goods and services because they know you can afford to.

"I'm sorry sir, our system says your wealth rating is 600, our discounts only apply to people with 400 or lower."

This sounds amazing to me :)

We already see this with how airlines alter the pricing depending on when the ticket is bought and whatsnot (because if it is bought for a middle of the week trip etc, it is likely to be a business trip).

But the key difference is that applies to everyone who wishes to make that purchase, not just particular people.

You can’t change just one thing. VA For Everyone will increase arguments of “Well I’m on the hook for your healthcare, so I should have a say in whether or not you …”

I live in Canada. Still applies. Just replace health insurance with life insurance, car insurance, or home insurance.

Indeed. Already seeing car insurance being based on age and gender. Because apparently young male drivers are more careless and aggressive in their driving style...

In general, why should someone's higher risk lifestyle be subsidized by other insurance customers?

My understanding is that the reason is because that's how insurance works.

Kinda. Insurance is about a pooling of risks, that does not mean that every risk level must be in the same pool. Houses that are built in flood-prone areas are forced to be in different insurance pools with higher rates than other houses because the risk profiles are different.

You know what I meant. OP only mentioned undifferentiated "someones."

Undifferentiated? They are specifically labeled as "higher risk".

This was the insight behind the founding of GEICO, originally the Government Employees Insurance Company. The Goodwins recognized that government employees are more risk averse than the average bear. By writing policies to civil servants only, they could profitably charge lower premiums.

Geico began offering policies to the general public in 1974, so this is historical trivia now.

>Geico began offering policies to the general public in 1974, so this is historical trivia now.

I do recall that they offered a rather significant military discount when I was a soldier. I have wonder if that discount was backed by actuarial data. I would rather expect members of the military to be higher risk than civilians or civil servants.

Risk tolerance is funny in that it’s not always uniform.

The region where I live is heavy in the defense industry. There are lots and lots of veterans here. Federal Acquisition Regulations give preference to veteran-owned small businesses and also to service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses. Despite that, in a town with lots of defense and lots of veterans, there aren’t a whole lot of VOSBs.

A few years ago, the dad of a schoolmate of my son’s retired as an Army Lieutenant Colonel. Even though he as a Ranger performed parachute jumps with weapon in hand into hostile territory, he had lived in post housing all his adult life and had never had a mortgage before. The civilian world and business customs were all foreign to him despite his having interacted closely with the contracting industry for years.

We get used to what we’re exposed to. After being told for years and years to jump out of perfectly good aircraft to go blow up this-or-that target, it becomes not quite so scary. Drop the typical cake eating civilian in that world, and he’s likely wetting his pants. Drop G.I. Joe in the new world of corporate finance, contract vehicles, teaming agreements, and business development, and it can be unsettling too.

Just curious, is there proof insurance companies can or do buy purchase histories? And if so, see other reply about universal healthcare.

Also, not to nitpick, but coffee is not linked to increased risk of heart problems, that's a myth.

Inherently evil and annoying? No, but in practice it's annoying and online at least, potentially problematic on other levels as well such as security and performance. Telemarketing isn't inherently evil and annoying either, but it's become a playground for scammers with robocalls and constantly shifting spoofed numbers. That, maybe, should tell you something about the nature of the medium, or at least the nature of the medium when it's being exploited by a broad population.

I think telemarketing is annoying, it's also intrusive and requires effort on my part. Passive advertisement on the internet does not.

Note I am not saying there are not annoying advertisements, but that's an issue of implementation, not the concept of targeted advertising. If anything, Google would know I will never click on an annoying ad if they "invaded my privacy" more than they do now.

Something like this should be opt-in for people like you. By default our private spending information should not be shared with 3rd parties.

> [...] so they can show me advertisements relevant to my interests.

That's the benefit to you. The other is that the business model supports the Google services you use.

The perfunctory question is: what are the costs to you and everyone else?

The question that piques my interest: why do you assume there aren't costs, or that the costs are negligible? Why does your belief that an institution isn't evil or annoying mean you only do the first half of a cost/benefit analysis?

Because all evidence I've seen is either sensationalized and based on emotion: "Oh no! My privacy!"

Or...I haven't seen any evidence there is a noticeable cost to me as a person?

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