Should they? The vast quantity of users find it incredibly useful and have no reason to be concerned about governments or third parties being able to determine their geographic location, because governments or third parties don't generally care.
Many aren't, but everyone has reason to.
Governments change. Telling your government your religion in 1920s Germany was harmless, in 1940 many would have preferred if the government didn't have their religion on file.
Circumstances change to. In 1920 being a Japanese in the US wasn't special. After Perl Harbor came the internment camps.
And then there's the mundane stuff. You protest a government policy, someone in the government takes issue and tries to put some of these annoying people in jail.
Given that you don't know when you might become an enemy of the state it's always a good idea to keep the power of the state over its citizens in check.
The game being played is not '1984', it is 'Foundation'.
It is for steering entire societies, and this works far better on the boring people who think they have nothing to hide as they are the easiest to model
With a single powerful player, you get a consistent, but slightly false narrative. If you have lots of players though, you get multiple competing narratives and the news stops making sense.
Is partly why I still think Gibson is one of the people who got it closest to the mark.
It's about being able to track anybody.
If people were deeply individually concerned about the risks vs. rewards of these technologies, they'd stop using them. That's the rubber-meets-the-road calculus I see.
Why do you think that? It clearly doesn't apply to stuff like oil, for instance.
I could give up my phone, but I would be in deep shit if I did it tomorrow. It would take a lot of arrangement to do so and it would piss off my family and lose me work.
People say they're concerned. But the actual number of people attempting to zero the amount of oil they use? Much lower than claimed concern.
Words are easy. Actions have costs that people would prefer not to take on.
How do you know how many there are? Anyone doing that couldn't travel except by foot, buy any commercial products or use any available communication services.
edit - alternatively, there are loads of people attempting to zero the amount of oil they use. They are just using oil to get there.
Every single one of the revelations you've mentioned was met with public backlash, followed by either a misinformation campaign or intense dog-wagging. This is called manufactured consent. For example, let's look at Cambridge Analytica. When it was revealed that a military contractor was hired to subvert the 2016 Presidential election, the dominant story in the alphabet-soup media was a twitter tantrum from Trump. As it became clear over the next few days that the story wasn't going to be buried easily, the narrative was quickly shifted away from the subversion of democracy to blaming Facebook for leaking user data, culminating in parading The Zuck before Congress. He played his part perfectly: no bread, but enough circus to keep the masses from thinking too hard about what it means for an election to be free.
People do the calculus to decide if risk is greater than reward all the time. It appears ubiquitous connectivity, for most people, is far more rewarding than risky.
Technically you're right but what you seem to be missing is that people (in general) suck at risk assessment. Although they are doing "the calculus", most of their calculations are based on heuristics that just don't reflect a rational analysis.
That is why so many people fear plane travel more than car travel, immigrants more than cigarettes, and pharmaceuticals more than "raw water".
See also: "Ayn Rand collected Social Security benefits." (And I abhor her oeuvre and "movement".)
I'm saying people make the claim on the average person's behalf that they want privacy and information such as their location (as triangulated by cellphone towers) kept generally secret from governments and corporations who can offer them benefits, and that claim is not actually supported by much evidence. I think the digital intelligentsia cares deeply; the average cell user, not so much.
That is, if Verizon was unambiguous with Joe Customer, "We may sell your real-time location information to companies known to re-sell that kind of information to the government, and you can't do anything about it" how many of them would be pissed? Isn't the state being restrained from un-warranted — literally — snooping into people's lives a core American value?
Your position is that most people would "meh". I think you're wrong. You're probably right that there's scant evidence either way, though.
I'm not sure why you would jump to concluding that it's a sustained campaign or some kind of reaction to guilt.
This breaks the site guidelines. Could you please read and follow them when commenting here? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Insinuations of astroturfing or shilling without evidence (an opposing view does not count as evidence) are an internet toxin that turns out to be worse than the things it insinuates, because it's so widespread. I've written a ton about why we don't allow that here, if anyone wants to read more: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I had a hard time understanding why people wouldn’t be more conscientious of their privacy, until I had discussions about the issue with people close to me.
My folks had a very similar sentiment to the typical “if you have nothing to hide, then why do you worry about it”. My girlfriend had the same thought, but took it a step further and asked why I cared so much about people uninvolved in my life knowing personal details about it, then said I was “the most paranoid person [she’d] ever met”
Once the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, they all understood my point. I think the majority of people who don’t work in tech don’t understand the massive implications that our lack of privacy has. They don’t know how cookies or backends or tracking pixels work, and may not even know they exist. They imagine an NSA agent sitting in a room looking for keywords, not companies that they entrust their digital lives to selling off every little piece of info about them. It’s so much more than your Facebook or Twitter posts being public, it’s data that we might not even know about ourselves being kept in the hands of unknown entities.
To sum up this rant, some people have to see it to believe it because this is outside their scope of knowledge
Users get no benefit from the information resale directly, but they also aren't generally harmed by it. And the benefit they get from having a ubiquitously-connected device in their pocket outweighs the (apparently calculated to be low) per-person cost to their information being resold. The fact that you or I may do the calculus differently for ourselves (because we have different risk sensitivity) doesn't impact those who don't reach the same conclusions.
Because I'm not specifically aware there's a cross-town bus with my name on it, I'm somehow not about to get pancaked?
There may come a time in your life when you wish to have a say in the political system or are wronged by a powerful corporation. You'd care in that case. When your political rights disappear, they aren't easy to get back.
Which circles back to the original question: should a person feel guilt over creating tools that help the average user and harm the political dissident? Seems an open question. Perhaps one heavily dependent upon whether the actor agrees with the political dissident's position.
We should not be creating a mass surveillance state. The actual abuses domestically generally of minority populations, abroad, generally of non-NATO civilian populations, and potential domestic abuses (with many well noted assassinations and infiltrations in the past) are alarming and have already stronger, more precise abilities for social control of the population by the state than existed in dictatorships. The Stasi would have killed for the NSA's database and planting live tracking beacons on most citizens.
I'm on the left, but the non-financial political freedoms of the right are a bellwether for my own (though the literally genocidal far right is a more complex discussion). In general this makes a lot of logical sense because conservatives and right wing ideologues wish to maintain the status quo (literally to conserve it) or to return society to a past state (e.g. the relation of men and women, the role of religion, etc.), and range from libertarian to authoritarian, neither of which really threaten established authorities (and often reinforce them) and so are treated with kid gloves (watch how police treat right wingers at protests on average). Blue lives matter is a right wing cri de cœur that's an example of a "protest" that celebrates existing civil authorities.
Liberals and more-so leftists wish to change society into a new state which threatens the established order. Therefore, the civil authorities do not treat them with deference. Typically political freedoms lost by the right are applied with vengeance against the left.
Encourage dissent. We make fun of countries that don't. :)
EDIT: added info on why losses of political freedoms for the right are an especially bad bellwether
Yes, the UK absolutely needs additional dissent.
That seems like a terrible idea.
I'd like to ask anyone within RF earshot to carry my packets. I'd even consider paying for faster bandwidth if others were offering below some threshold. Some common low bandwidth communication should always work, say some fraction (split between freeloading users) of 20% of the link speed. I'll carry your packets if you're in earshot, rebroadcasting as needed, following the same rules. We could rotate our source addresses every so often.
You'd be persona non-grata (illegal) if you're recording and sharing who you hear. At the heart of it, saving and recording in perpetuity who you're communicating with and where ought to be illegal. Certainly selling that data should be too, or you end up with what we have today.