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Comment by hshehehjdjdjd | Hacker News Reader

The only difference is that dumping toxic waste in rivers does actual, concrete harm. Targeted advertising? The worst I’ve heard about it is that it makes some people feel a little icky. I suppose that’s a concrete harm in a sense but it seems a much less serious one, at least to me.

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> The worst I’ve heard about it is that it makes some people feel a little icky.

Yeah sure, all that privacy, who needs it anyway?

Its interesting how one of the most frequent uses of the right to be forgotten is used by politicians cleaning up their search history.

Who would have thought that legislators had something to gain from a proposal they push?

Who would have thought that legislators would be aware of legislation.

I’m sorry but this is not really a substantive objection to what I said. Yes, people have a vague preference for privacy. I never disputed that. No, failing to respect that preference has not caused material, externally visible harm.

We're not taking about some vague concept. For some of us it is part of the constitution. It's the RIGHT to privacy. Your attempts at downplaying it are the main vehicle of the advertisement industry and it's a disgrace at least. This ideology has educated those "people" to ignore that by hiding the means and downplaying the relevance. This law tries to at least regain some of the awareness that has been lost in the last decades and this is why the industry is crying so much.

You have a constitutional right to privacy from the government. There is no such constitutional right (in the U.S.) that would prevent private surveillance, especially in cases where it is consensual.

How can anything be consensual even under the broken US law if one side doesn't know about it or at least doeasn't understand what is happening?!

At least in US law, it is incumbent on the parties of a contract to understand it. If they sign without understanding, that’s on them. Terms of use are a contract between you and a website owner. If you don’t understand them, you can either not use the website, or accept the risk that you’re consenting to something you may not like. (Again, this is the current state in the U.S. I’m aware it’s different elsewhere.)

> The worst I’ve heard about it is that it makes some people feel a little icky.

The worst I've heard of was the abuse of millions of people's data by Cambridge Analytics to mess with an election, but maybe that's just a little icky too?

Your usage of "abuse" is offensive to people that really experienced abuse.

Yeah right, because words always just have one meaning and one context.

Targeted advertising provides a financial incentive to create a total surveillance structure. It pays off to know every little detail about people's psychology and their habits. So companies have a motivation to create systems that future dictatorships will happily be using.

Without targeted advertising there is much less financial incentive to collect data so the surveillance state won't get help from corporations.

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