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Comment by duckduckno | Hacker News Reader

I used to be a privacy advocate until I realized the futility of trying to thwart the data collectors. Our Information is everywhere whether we like it or not and the only way to avoid its aggregation is by not associating with the world and abandoning the convenience of modern technology. I feel like at some point we just have to accept the loss of privacy to gain better harmony within our communities.

I would recommend The Transparent Society by David Brin to anyone interested in this matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society

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I could empathize with your viewpoint more if not for the fact the lack of privacy wouldn’t be symmetrical. The middle and lower class will lose all semblance of privacy while the elite will be able to buy it. Case in point Mark Zuckerberg buying up that Hawaiian island.

Not only is it unfair but when the rich are just getting richer them having privacy while no one else does just allows for so many more ways for the poor to get screwed.

I don't think I quite understand your argument, could you please elaborate a bit? I have always been under the assumption that fame grows linearly with wealth and the more famous someone is the less privacy they hold. Is that inaccurate? I could tell you that Warren Buffet is 1.78 m tall and that I know where he was born but I honestly know nothing about the minimum-wage-working Bob Smith.

If you were to find the most personal details of this Mr. Smith it would be far easier to do that. You could sit outside his house whole day long and observe his every move, dumpster dive into his trash and get documents, even bribe a certain official and get more info out of him/ her. I don't think any of that will be possible in the case of Warren Buffet.

That will be very difficult to do with Warren Buffet because he assumes that people will already be trying to do that. Mr. Smith, on the other hand, knows that he is low profile enough to be ignored among the masses. I fail to see why anyone would spend the time stalking someone who is not wealthy; the return value of finding information on Mr. Smith is not worth the trouble.

If anything, Ad companies would more aggressively target the wealthy because they have more money to spend.

I'm glad you mentioned this- something that perplexed me a lot this year about the uproar on privacy is how people expect to have the ability to upload unlimited amount of personal images and videos for free, make internet call for free and somehow don't expect these companies to make money. And privacy is currency unfortunately- if we were in a perfect society everything will be open sourced and like signal all tech companies will be publicly funded- but it's not. We fail to see value in these companies and what they do and instead demonize them. Hopefully someone can let me see what I'm missing.

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