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Comment by trgv | Hacker News Reader

Each employee should act according to their conscience, not according to your conscience.

Your perspective reminds me of a Chris Rock joke: "How come it's only unemployed people who tell you to quit something?" The point being: it's really easy to tell someone to quit their excellent, fulfilling job over some moral outrage that you perceive.

Finally, while I understand this is an unpopular opinion around here, I believe the tech community's focus on privacy is overwrought. We should expect to be tracked on the internet. If you're doing something that you don't want to be tracked, there are numerous tools to avoid tracking. Making those tools cheap and accessible seems like a worthy cause to me. Fighting for overly broad legislation like this seems like a waste of time.

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I do think you make a good point.

That said, there are also plenty of people that do choose what they perceive to be the 'high road' despite the consequences, and based on my personal experiences these people are not rare, but not plentiful either.

Most of us try to find a kind of 'middle road', and the conviction of those that do choose these high roads can be extremely valuable, as I personally believe the default is that it's easy to go for the 'low road'.

All that said, I do find people who tell others to take the high road without doing so themselves, or from a completely different situation, to be tiresome.

As for your unpopular opinion: part of me thinks that the cat's out of the bag and we'll have to find a way to deal with a world where privacy is basically non-existent. I could see a way forward in such a world provided that privacy does not become yet another thing that only those in positions of privilege or power can afford. It could be interesting, maybe even positive, if lack of privacy becomes a fact of life across the board.

That said, I think it's too early to conclude it's all a lost cause, but I quite likely might be naive about all this. Mostly I count myself lucky that I can think about these matters with no obvious or direct 'skin in the game'. For now, at least.

"I do find people who tell others to take the high road without doing so themselves, or from a completely different situation, to be tiresome."

You don't have to take the high road. But then don't try to pretend you're not part of the problem.

Yes...?

>Each employee should act according to their conscience, not according to your conscience.

This ignores that when you ask them about their conscience they will tell you that they support privacy and all of that good jazz, so can I at least expect them to come out in the future and tell me honestly that they don't give a damn instead of branding themselves like saviors and friendly neighbours?

>Making those tools cheap and accessible seems like a worthy cause to me. Fighting for overly broad legislation like this seems like a waste of time.

Protecting our citizens privacy falls under the obligation of the state and legislation. No citizen should be required to hack together technical solutions to escape constant spying, the fact aside that most people do not even possess the expertise to do this.

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