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Comment by kristianc | Hacker News Reader

> The survey says: 9 out of ten americans care deeply about privacy (particuarly around data privacy and collection)

This is a problem with focus groups. Ask people 'do you care about your privacy', and almost everyone will answer yes.

There's almost zero social cost to answering that question in the affirmative.

On the other hand, there's a good deal of social sacrifice in leaving these platforms for good.

More likely - they don't care about privacy as much as they say they do and are leaving Facebook because it has become a polluted river of crap.

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Exactly. Asking someone "do you want to have more savings?" is meaningless. Everyone will say yes. The right question to ask is "will you cook at home to save $10000 a year?"

And even out of the majority of people who will say, “yes, they’ll cook at home to save $10K,” only a small percent of those will actually do so.

> only a small percent of those will actually do so.

Even then, it won't save them the money. Like anything else, if you want to save the money - you have to move it out of your regularly accessed account, and put it somewhere else, ideally an account you can't withdraw as easily from.

So - when you cook for your family to save the money - you need to then (immediately) move the money you would normally spend for dinner (perhaps minus the amount for ingredients, time, and power - if you feel it necessary) over to that other account.

But most people never do that, I'd wager.

Instead, that extra money stays in their primary account, which they then likely spend on something else. So their savings continue to be zero (or likely less), and they continue to wonder where their money goes...

Much easier to appoach these the other way round: I could choose not to cook at home, but that would cost me a fortune, so I never stopped doing it. Best way to avoid expenses is not to commit to them in the first place.

Same goes for avoiding exploitative apps: never install apps unless there's no alternative. Block all ads. Deny all notifications, especially on the desktop browser. No, I won't send you my location.

It's annoying to have to maintain a wall of "no" but it saves problems in the long run.

> On the other hand, there's a good deal of social sacrifice in leaving these platforms for good.

I honestly don't think that there is much social sacrifice involved in leaving these platforms. I think there's a good deal of fear of social sacrifice, though.

You have the exact same pattern around road/airplane/food safety, hygiene and disease control, housing quality, and much more...

All problems that people care about but the average person cannot tackle autonomously.

And that's why societies implemented regulatory bodies (often through national governments, but that's not a requirement).

GDPR is a small step in that direction.

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