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Comment by QAPereo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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