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Comment by dranoel0226 | Hacker News Reader

I have nothing to hide and why wouldn't I want ads that better reflect my preferences?

If you have nothing to hide, you also have nothing to say. You also have zero to gain by expressing your assent to what is happening already anyway. You are actually drowning out many people who have no voice in this matter but silently believe in very important things like human rights, of which privacy is absolutely key to freedom and free expression.

I generally think open dialogue is a good thing, but your comment just bolsters those in positions of power to the detriment of everyone else for literally nothing other than reducing your own minor personal annoyance. Want better ads? Mail them a dossier on your life story and leave the rest of us out of it.

I'll try to tackle the idea that you have nothing to hide. Let's assume that every last moment of your life has been collected, indexed, then either sold or hacked. It's all out there, for anyone to see. If you think this is implausible, consider that most people are never outside of arms reach of their gps/microphone/camera and that much of the data that's ever been collected has already been hacked or sold.

Would you prefer to hide:

-recordings of your sexual encounters from your family?

-the raunchiest porn you've ever looked at from your co-workers?

-your live GPS location from home burglars?

-your bank account balance from friends?

-your tax filings from scam artists?

-your off-color remarks you made 15 years ago while drunk from the person conducting your job interview?

-the drugs you tried in college from law enforcement?

-The minor legal transgression you committed from the person looking to shut down your political protest?

-the psychological trigger even you were unaware of from the deep learning algorithm designed to addict you to gambling.

-your sexual orientation from the autocratic government of the vacation spot you visited?

The only people who truly have nothing to hide are those who truly have nothing to lose. If that's you, then I'm sincerely sorry.

Why do you want ads at all?

This is the actual question to ask. Advertising is either a convenient scapegoat by ruling classes, or it is inherently destructive. Either way, a clear headed free society would ban advertising in its current form and seek other means of providing the utility of advertisement for goods and services. At the end of the day, that is all advertising is supposed to provide. Yet somehow this relatively insignificant aspect of society is put front and center as the reason for all sort of shenanigans.

I don't want ads in the abstract, but I want them more than the alternatives I've seen offered. Ditto for capitalism and democracy :)

Because the alternative is paying.

Do you want to pay for all the hundred sites you visit in a year?

No, I would more carefully pick and choose which sites I care to visit since I have to pay for them. I can, of course, pick and choose the sites now based on how bad the advertisement is, but because advertisement is so prevalent, I don’t really get a choice because most sites use advertisement. Ironically, the sites I’d be most willing to pay for (like HN) are also the ones with few or no adverts.

The most valuable ones mostly aren't ad supported or paid anyway, and without competition from ad supported sites even more free ones for more purposes would exist and thrive (e.g. if Reddit died all those free volunteer run forums that used to be such a big part of the Web would come back)

This makes me shudder. Companies with powerful AI and enough data could control the population in ways indiscernible to an individual. By organizing goods in stores and placing the right ads at the right time it could be possible to lead users on a treasure hunt to a political or economic opinion.

How do you know you're not in the vanguard of that attack on humanity? How do you know the comment you just posted isn't propaganda in service of your puppetmaster. Perhaps you're bringing about that which you fear, powerless in the grip of an omnipotent AI possessed by a faceless bureaucracy somewhere.

You are an outlier, most people like their privacy and do not want to be manipulated by advertisers.

Disagree. I think the last fifty years proves that the vast majority of people will almost always go with convenience over some abstract ideal of "privacy".

People don't care about privacy in the abstract but do care once it becomes concrete. If you ask someone if they are willing to let an impersonal algorithm analyze their data in exchange for a free service, the answer is generally yes. If you ask them if you can read their email and peruse their browsing history, the answer is almost always no.

The problem privacy advocates have is forging a link between the abstract and the concrete. I don't really care that Experian compiles a list of my credit data. I really do care when they fuck up and leak it publicly. The tricky thing is that the former is a prerequisite for the latter, so I should care about that, too.

If you ask someone if they are willing to let an impersonal algorithm analyze their data in exchange for a free service, the answer is generally yes. If you ask them if you can read their email and peruse their browsing history, the answer is almost always no.

Exactly. That's why I put "privacy" in quotes. I think people are smarter than you give them credit for. I don't give out the password to my email account, but do I care that much if Google has some machine learning algorithm with a bunch of data points buried in there that I use the word "NYC" a lot? No, I really don't care. And yeah, they might get hacked and leak my emails to the world. That would suck. But that risk is worth it to me, and judging by the hundreds of millions of people with Gmail accounts, I'm not alone.

Is that so? If you look at people's behavior, most people seem to accept targeted advertising. Every bit of evidence I've seen indicates that the outrage against the practice comes from a small minority with a disproportionate voice --- much like many other sources of chronic public outrage today. Regular people, to the best of my knowledge, don't care.

I think most people have no idea what is going on and literally would not be able to understand it even if it were laid out in black and white. Even then, most people "understand" that smoking causes cancer. Behavior is not always a good predictor of people's internal mental states. Addiction is real. Damn that dopamine. Is smoking somehow fine because lots of people do it and it kills you slow? (I say that as someone who can't help but have a cig now and then).

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