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Comment by arihant | Hacker News Reader

It's not reasonable at all. You're 1 instance of bad luck away from death. But that's hardly a reason to not leave home.

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Presumably you get value from leaving home, and these people realized they weren’t getting value from Facebook.

Personally I have still friends I cannot switch to other platforms so I am stuck checking my Facebook messages once a month, but that is the only reason I still have an account, and I have unliked everything else from the service.

The likelihood of death isn't enough to keep me from from leaving my house, but it is enough to keep me from driving without buckling my seatbelt. Everyone has to do their own cost-benefit calculations, and the benefits of Facebook will not always outweigh the costs of having their personal data leaked.

It's hardly a reason to leave home, but it's definitely a reason to, for example, not go skydiving.

You obviously can't remove all risk, but you sure can reduce it.

That might not be the best example, though. You are more likely to die driving to the airport than you are to die while skydiving. That is an activity which is similar to riding a roller coaster: it seems much more dangerous than it actually is.

> You are more likely to die driving to the airport than you are to die while skydiving.

Can you back that up? I thought this was true too but did a quick check anyway and I found skydiving death rates are 8 in a million but driving death rates are 7.1 per billion kilometers. Driving to the airport is probably more dangerous than your average drive, but it still looks like the car trip is less likely to kill you.

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