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Comment by matte_black | Hacker News Reader

The thing is that for most people avoiding this kind of tech and platforms is unlikely to have any kind of payoff for them. Life is too short.

Most peoples lives are as simple as going to school and work, raising a family, taking vacations, paying bills, and then passing away.

There will never be a moment where they can say “Yes! My avoidance of Facebook and Alexa for all my life has finally paid off! Hahaha!”

The only people who can say that are people who have good reasons to hide: drug dealers with multiple lines of business, professional black hat hackers, home grown terrorists, life insurance fraudsters, etc.

The average person has nothing of interest to offer except more information about them in order to better perceive trends and distribute ads to them so that maybe they buy something.

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Your list is missing "pro-democracy advocates", "Muslims", "Christians", "Jews", "atheists", "women who want an abortion", "people trying to escape an abusive relationship", "people with interesting medical conditions", etc, depending on location.

Please don't pretend that both "only criminals have something to hide" and "criminals are by definition bad people" are true statements. Neither is true.

If you live under a government where those examples are a reason to hide, then in the eyes of that government you are technically a criminal. Doesn’t describe my government.

Even under the most oppressive governments though, there will still be a sizable majority that doesn’t have anything to hide and can feel secure using most technology, and they’ll be fine.

> Doesn’t describe my government.

... yet? :)

> Doesn’t describe my government.

This mindset seems to be why the US political parties keep handing each other more and more federal power. Nobody can imagine their nation would be so stupid as to ever put the Other Guys back in power again.

First, having talked a lot to people who actually lived under a somewhat oppressive government (USSR, and by the 80s it wasn't even that oppressive), most people _did_ in fact have something to hide.

Second, just because it doesn't describe your government now doesn't mean it won't in the future, unfortunately. Consider examples of a 1920s German, or a 1960s Iranian (the old regime was oppressive too, but in different ways), or a 2000s citizen of Poland.

Third, there are certainly places where the danger is not from the government but from your neighbors, including to some of the groups I listed. So thinking about this only from the perspective of governments and criminality is off. Hence my claim that "only criminals have something to hide" is a false statement.

Fourth, I suspect that perception of how much one has to hide is highly age-dependent. As people get older they discover more and more things that they either want to hide or wish they could have hidden. Maybe I'm wrong in my guess as to your age, of course, but if I am not, I strongly urge talking about this sort of thing with people a few decades older. It can be _very_ eye-opening. Certainly was for me.

> Second, just because it doesn't describe your government now doesn't mean it won't in the future, unfortunately. Consider examples of a 1920s German, or a 1960s Iranian (the old regime was oppressive too, but in different ways), or a 2000s citizen of Poland.

This is the risk averse argument against certain technologies. If you believe your government won’t change and are willing to take that bet, you can lean into technologies very hard and reap the benefits.

Of course, if you think there may be a day where your government will change and use technologies against you, you could live out in the boonies and never even touch a computer, and thus get no benefits from emerging tech.

It’s a trade off between being at the bleeding edge and being as secure and private as possible. Personally, I have made my decision. Could it be my undoing one day if government decides I’m guilty of everything? Sure, but I doubt it will happen. I’ll take the bet.

As I said above everyone can make this decision for themselves, and should. It's just important to me to not paint any of the decisions here as "only criminals would do that"! Past that, I figure adults can and should decide these things for themselves.

That said, I also think we should work toward changing the nature of the tradeoff, e.g. by changing how voice assistants work to minimize the privacy issues. I suspect there's a lot of work we could do on that front while not compromising the functionality of the voice assistants.

I get what you are saying, and agree with you in principle... but the problem is, I am none of those things. I have none of the qualities that I need to hide from anyone, rather neighbors or the government. While it kinda feels creepy to imagine myself being listened to, I can't imagine any real consequences to my private conversations being heard.

However, I know that there are lots of people who do have those things they need to hide, and if only the people who need to keep things private work to keep things private, than the very fact that they are keeping things private becomes a risk factor.

Just like how part of the value of https everywhere is to prevent encrypted traffic from standing out, everyone maintaining privacy helps prevent people who NEED privacy from standing out.

Of course, as an individual, there is a cost for demanding that privacy - I lose out on the benefits of things like the echo and facebook. And since I am not an individual who needs privacy, there is no individual incentive to maintain it. It is a bit of a collective action problem.

Hey Alexa, do these symptoms sound like cancer?

"Sir, we have decided for unspecified reasons to suddenly decline your medical insurance. Have a nice day."

Right, I have a hard time faulting people for deciding that they want to use voice assistants. That's more or less their choice. I am a lot more ambivalent about people who leave the voice assistants running when they have guests, because at that point they are making that choice for the guests too...

I think there's a lot of unexplored "how should/will society work" ground here, or at least explored only in science fiction, and it will be interesting to see how things shake out in the future. Maybe we will move to an "assume everyone is recorded all the time and put 0 weight on these recordings in anything that matters" world, for example... Hard to tell.

I agree with the sibling comment, but just had to respond to this:

> The average person has nothing of interest to offer except more information about them in order to better perceive trends and distribute ads to them so that maybe they buy something.

This is a remarkably dehumanizing way of looking at people. You’re basically saying that people have nothing useful to offer except things we can use to sell them more stuff.

What would you say if the voice recordings were used to offer you differential pricing of items on Amazon? What if they profiled you and charged you 20% more because your speech patterns indicated you had more money? What if they sold this profiling data so that everybody charged you more? What if they shared the data with governments which ended up resulting in you not being able to get stop over visas, etc because you are and "undesirable" person to that government?

I'm not actually suggesting that Amazon does this right now, but it would be pretty easy for them to do so. People should be very worried about this technology and if they choose to use it, they should be absolutely sure the data is being used in a way that doesn't screw them over. Your boring data is absolutely interesting to people who want to abuse you. That's why there's such a big price on it!

> The only people who can say that are people who have good reasons to hide: drug dealers with multiple lines of business, professional black hat hackers, home grown terrorists, life insurance fraudsters, etc.

That this flawed and toxic thinking is so often repeated, especially in tech circles, truly horrifies me.

Ok, can I see your credit card statements for the last 5 years? Can I listen to all of your phone conversations? Can I watch you shower and use the bathroom? I mean, you sound like an average person with nothing to hide...../s

> Can I watch you shower and use the bathroom?

This approaches one thing I always wonder when this comes up: Are people with that argument really okay with their co-workers finding out what porn they watch and when they watch it?

It's perhaps a little extreme, but I can totally see it becoming a possibility due to large leaks like this.

You are ignoring the possibility that people saying that don't watch porn. I don't.

Regardless, I disagree with the argument, as things you don't need to hide now can become things you wish you had hidden later (think of Jewish people in Germany in the 1920s whose religion and ethnicity were obvious).

Sure. The only condition is that you don't share the information in public, on pain of massive fines and imprisonment - you can only use it to improve your internal business processes.

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