Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

I'd widen this to include search engines, forums, much of the rest of the internet, phone companies, cable companies, banks, and many other companies. Everyone seems to want to get in on the spying game these days, most every company wants to know as much as possible about their customers.

Of course, Facebook differs from most companies in the amount of data it manages to collect about its users. A cable company isn't going to know nearly as much about its typical customer as Facebook knows, but they can still probably infer a surprising amount from your viewing habits -- including political views based on which news programs you watch, for instance.

Web forums could know even more than cable companies, as many people are quite candid in discussing what they think and care about on them. Then there are communications companies like Skype, which have access to all sorts of confidential and sensitive communications.

The list goes on and on, and I'm really not sure how this runaway freight train of voluntary participation in surveillance can be stopped at this point, as for most people all these services are too damn convenient, and virtually none of them were built with strong privacy, much less anonymity in mind.

Commenters on Internet forums don’t see them as surveillance platforms, from which they must hide their views.

These are platforms for speech. People crave and seek such platforms, and frankly I think they provide a valuable service in disseminating ideas that corporate entities have no incentives to.

It verges on absurd to criticize platforms designed to transmit public speech on the grounds that they might leak that information.

There seems to be a quaint archetype floating in the collective consciousness with an image of privacy that has never existed, outside of recluses living in exile from their community.

Historically, anyone living in a small community had such a lack of privacy, that it would be intolerable to many modern city dwellers.

There needs to be a more nuanced and realistic concept of how personal information is managed, by all entities who touch it.

> Historically, anyone living in a small community had such a lack of privacy, that it would be intolerable to many modern city dwellers.

We're talking about information age though, where the information can be gathered in massive quantities and processed and used in ways such past communities would not even dream about.

These days someone can be harrased by some idiot/criminal from other side of the globe.

So the issue is not really comaprable, and risks are different.

> most every company wants to know as much as possible about their customers

And it's crazy that we're allowing them to do that in the "data breach era". Companies should should be incentivized/penalized to keep the absolute minimum information it needs for its services. The less data, the better, and the less it would be penalized in case of a data breach. The more data it stores and the more data it exposes in a data breach, the bigger the penalties should be for it.

Companies would ignore that at their own peril, as the penalties should be a big percentage of the global annual revenues. So a company like Equifax would have to come out either crippled or bankrupt out of a data breach where it exposed all of the US adults' information.

Build the right system, and companies will be "incentivized" to do the right thing. This is why the EU is doing the right thing with the GDPR, and if the US Congress wasn't completely captured by corporations by now, it would probably do something like that, too.

But even GDPR doesn't go as far as I'd like, to the point where companies would be incentivized to use minimum amounts of information and switch to end-to-end encrypted systems (which by default would bring minimum to zero penalties in case of server data breach).

Once people

> how this runaway freight train ... can be stopped at this point

Once people realize what they will lose, then the only way to win is not to play.

What and how will they lose? What kind of potential harms do you foresee happening to the users of social media, as a consequence of that use?

There has been some discussion here about China’s plan to increase use of social media as a means of societal control.

Is the problem that people are sharing to much information, or is the problem that China has an authoritarian government with little respect for the rights of its citizens?

Information is a potent substance. Kind of like fissile material - tricky to handle, and can be used for a lot of good and bad things, depending on who manages to get their hands on it.

That said, I somewhat agree with you here; I feel there's way too much focus on data handling, and way too little focus on who's doing what with it. The problem isn't information. The problem in China is an authoritarian government. The problem in the West is that we've managed to somehow convince ourselves that lying to people, and maliciously manipulating them, is a legitimate and respected profession (that now happens to finance the Internet).

Sure, you don't want to have information lying around for bad actors to make use of. But I think we should also start dealing with the fact that there already are so many bad actors doing bad things with information, and maybe we should have less bad actors in the first place.

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