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Comment by wilsonnb | Hacker News Reader

I'm not the person you're asking this question to, but I thought I'd reply anyways.

No, it doesn't really bother me. Why would anyone care that I get up around 7AM on weekdays, drive to work around 9, stay there until 5, and then drive home?

On weekends they will see me going to Target and the grocery store. Sometimes another store. Sometimes I go to visit my family in another city.

I really don't care if people have that information. Many people (not me) post that information freely on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

There are some future situations in which I might care that I am being tracked. If that were the case, it's highly unlikely I would bring a phone with me.

Would I prefer not to be tracked? Probably. Does it bother me that I am being tracked? Nope.

I suspect these views line up with the majority of people in the US.

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  Why would anyone care that I get up around 7AM on weekdays

No one does. But let's assume you suddenly won the lottery. Now a lot of people care, and they're able to perfectly plan when exactly to rob your house as you are gone.

Just because you have no self-esteem doesn't mean other important people shouldn't have rights.

I wonder how many of the 16-million East Germans had this same utopian outlook on it..

Edit: While things are "good", I'm sure you and a lot of others don't see an issue. But you're giving yourself a lot of rope to be hung on if ever things become hard.

I guess my view of the situation is that the massive collection of data only becomes a problem in situations where we can absolutely not trust our government, and if things get that bad then we have much bigger problems than the government having a lot of data about us. At that point they don't need evidence of wrongdoing to drag people into the street and shoot them, so it doesn't matter to me if they have it.

The trouble is that they might target a group that you are logged to be a part of. For a concrete example, the reason the Nazis were so successful in finding Jews in the Netherlands is because the government there kept (and keeps, if I'm not mistaken) a list of people and which faith they belong to. That list was then handed over to the invaders, who made really good use of it in the time after.

Nobody before that point really stopped to consider whether or not it was a good idea this data existed in the hands of the people that had it. If they did, they probably thought there was nothing to hide (or even that it was a good idea, perhaps). At this point, we should know better. For the ones targeted, there were no bigger problems than the fact that someone had this data about them.

Sorry. In your years of volunteering with the homeless you rubbed shoulders with the wrong people. Our data says you are Islamofilic. Please present yourself at the interrogation booth March 1st 2025. That's why.

At that point, what's to stop them from forcing me to present myself at the interrogation booth anyways? Does it matter if they have data "proving" that I've done something wrong, or if they just make it up?

The "evil government" can't actually gain anything by targeting people completely at random. They'll have some class of political enemies and be very happy if they have a way to identify them.

The problem is that, today, you can't predict what will get you in trouble tomorrow. So even if you intend to live your entire life in complete compliance with whatever the current government wants, you won't be able to live in compliance with what the next set wants in the future. You can't simulate liberty by keeping your head down - eventually you will disagree with the government.

To a lot of people, "disagreeing with the government" means convincing a population that is largely happy with the way things are that something unjust or wrong is happening. That's the pattern of civil rights, environmentalism, and other activist movements that we have had in the West. This is not the whole story: in countries and times with poorer situations, disagreeing with the government can mean a conflict with your own practical (economic) well-being, as a member of no particular minority. In fact it is all of this bean counting about rights an liberty that keeps us away from "disagreeing with the government" in ways that are easier to convince people about the significance of.

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