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Comment by kafkaesq | Hacker News Reader

If you want HN to be a place of real discussion and debate, it's stupid to try to tie people to their companies.

When the company is Google (or of a similar scale) -- and that company claims to care about privacy (but sometimes engages in practices that suggest otherwise) -- then clearly that association is quite relevant. (Its not a huge oversight, but really, if you had put a standard disclaimer at the end of your comment it would have come off a lot more nicely).

But calling people "stupid" for pointing out that this association matters (when it obviously does) is just... "Google-y", I guess.

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"But calling people "stupid" for pointing out that this association matters (when it obviously does) is just... "Google-y", I guess. "

You have not given any reason the association actually matters here[1], nor engaged the argument on the merits Instead, you did precisely what i said would happen - character assassination for no reason. You also assert i called people stupid, which is also clearly false, I instead expressed that the notion that tying people to their companies would do anything useful is stupid.

[[1] It doesn't. You can engage the arguments on the merits whether it had my name or anyone else's. In fact, you'll see i didn't even express an argument past "it sucks they can sell info", and that i didn't give a shit about the complaint itself because it suggests that it's okay to sell it to certain people, when i feel it's not okay to sell it to anyone. I haven't actually seen anyone cogently disagree with this, and it's 100000000% irrelevant to where i work.

> IE It's not "better" when they sell it to someone who isn't Google

It obviously is, because these other someones don't have the same amount of information on you. It seems not unlikely to me (and probably others) that your difficulty in appreciating this point is employment related, even if you are arguing in good faith and are not consciously aware of it.

I don't disagree with you that the correct fix is to prohibit the sale of this information in general.

You also assert i called people stupid, which is also clearly false,

Sorry, but saying "it's stupid to do X" really is basically the same as saying... "people who do X are stupid". Or at least "they are, in that context, being stupid".

Either way, you said what you said -- and presumably you meant what you said -- so there's no point in trying to wiggle away from it.

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