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Comment by hrktb | Hacker News Reader

Fair question. I wonder if it might change much thought, depending on the frame of reference.

I think a lot of us grew up with siblings in the same room. Rooms didn’t lock. Parents not looking but knowing all too well what’s going on. Schools reporting on behavior by phone or by letter that as a kid you didn’t get to see.

I think for me the notion of ‘privacy’ was just being left alone with no one bothering me. It’s only as an adult that I have a clear perimeter where no one should be able to step in. In that regard having a lot of your doings leaked to parents might not be that impacting.

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> In that regard having a lot of your doings leaked to parents might not be that impacting.

I disagree. It was super stressful/impactful to me as a child. Knowing my parents would be called for misbehavior at school put undue stress on me all day after getting “an orange ticket” or later, detention. I’d get punished at school then punished worse at home.

Once, in first or second grade, my uncle divulged some petty thing I said to him in passing to my parents leading to a sit down talk. I was uncomfortable and angry. This damaged my trust.

...I think a lot of us grew up with siblings in the same room. Rooms didn’t lock.

Indeed, but those were your family members. You knew them well and there was context, for good or ill.

But in this case the device is a bunch of strangers. Perhaps no one stranger listening in, but everything being processed off site and added to the profile Amazon or Google is building about you.

The device is not a bunch of strangers. There's no humans listening to "your" conversation. Though they may be listening to anonymized clips. The activity stored is also your own to control.

I think such privacy concepts are too abstract for a child to be concerned about. You'd be hurting their view of technology and enforcing an idea of Big Brother if you were to teach them a voice assistant is a bunch of strangers listening to you.

I think facebook+cabridge analytica et al, and google's collection of location data even when the user opts out (just to name two), shows that it really is a bunch of strangers listening to you.

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