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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

So... Why should we care?

If I had to give my father some reasons why this should concern him, I'd come up blank. Maybe you can fill in a few.

The number of reasons you should care are numerous. One facet of the dystopian nightmare that total surveillance inevitably brings is already being realized in China.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-new-tool-for-social-cont...

They're collecting data on children without their informed consent, babies today have their information capital compromised from the moment they are born, via their parents shares, purchases, and activity, without their say.

But then why should anyone care about "informed consent" of their "information capital"?

Because the risks involved with complete knowledge of everyone at every moment are huge. Consider that most developed countries have for decades spent millions in spy agencies to get just enough dirt on people of interest to be able to manipulate them.

Imagine that the same information is now available on all people to many giant companies, some with almost government like spheres of influence, you can see the potential for manipulation grow.

The other part of Facebook in particular is that they sell that leverage to advertisers. An example of that would be the possibility that Russia influenced the US election. Whether or not it happened in either direction, the concept and possibility is something to be worried about.

The reason we should still care even though it seems ubiquitous already is because we messed up by getting here, but we can still fix it.

Well I'm paranoid enough to think such possibilities are a problem. But how do you sell those concerns to the average person?

Already many companies check the social media accounts of people applying for a job. A company can't legally discriminate against you based on gender, race, ethnicity, age, etc... But an HR drone can easily roundfile your resume because he doesn't agree with your political views.

That's why employers requiring social media information is illegal in a dozen states or so. (Illinois, I know for sure. There are others.)

Is your question why privacy is important, or are you thinking of something else?

They have to respect our privacy. The moment they don't, it will cause widespread outrage.

Once I realized that, it was hard to think of reasons why their actions are wrong.

I ... don’t know what to say. What they are doing now is respectful?

If we ever come to widespread outrage, it will be much to late. In fact, I don’t think there can be outrage. FB would detect it and make it disappear. Somehow.

Remember when Target snitched to a teenager’s parents that she was pregnant because her purchases fit the “is pregnant” profile, and everyone got outraged, and they stopped profiling people?

Actually, only the first two things happened.

Actually, only one of those things happened, the one in the middle. I'll let you dig into Forbes's "sources" to figure out how they managed to twist a hypothetical into something that already happened.

I did a quick search and found a Forbes article based on a New York Times article which claims it really happened:

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habi...

It is possible that their source was lying or mistaken, of course.

I think degrees of hearsay is getting up there, but that's for everyone to decide.

The author talked to an employee who talked to the man whose daughter was flagged as pregnant. It would be nice if they could have talked directly to the man, but that doesn't seem too distant. In any case, it hardly seems to warrant a scare-quoted "sources," nor would I describe that as "twist a hypothetical."

You have now refuted the story twice in this thread without providing any evidence of its inaccuracies. While I don’t know for certain the validity of the story, you aren’t doing much to persuade me of your position.

Facebook is amassing a huge amount of valuable information on every member.

I disagree that the threat of outrage is sufficient to stop the information being used badly. For example, there is outrage against Equifax, but their cache of information has still been compromised. We have seen data leak after data leak from various companies. If a country's spy agencies want to go after the data, they have a lot of resources, from hacking to legislation to physical intrusion or coercion.

Add to that, it seems like Facebook doesn't institutionally care about privacy (probably because it is hard to explain something to someone whose paycheck depends on them not understanding it). For example, http://actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com has some very damaging graph searches. Or people who have been outed as gay by incomprehensible privacy settings.

Facebook is a sieve, and the reason to care about them having a lot of information is the same reason to care about privacy in general.

There has been enough manufactured outrage to make people or decision makers stop caring about it.

> The moment they don't, it will cause widespread outrage.

lol.

For me the fear is insurance companies denying cover or increasing premiums based on some random search, share or like that actually has no relevance to the cover, then not telling you why they made that decision.

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