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Comment by morley | Hacker News Reader

I think HN in particular is too focused on "loss of privacy" as an issue. It seems to me that loss of privacy, while concerning, hasn't caused a fraction of the tangible, measurable problems in the west that misinformation and echo chambers have caused. Loss of privacy hasn't caused anti-immigrant fear-mongering, or conspiracy theorists harassing school shooting victims, or people not vaccinating their children. In areas of the world where loss of privacy _has_ caused citizen harm, it's usually as a result of a despotic regime (thinking specifically of Venezuela).

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It's unfortunate that HN is more willing to downvote dissenting ideas like this than discuss them.

Yes, the loss of privacy the internet has brought has been immense. However, the complete overhaul of social structures, the influence of large platforms on them (such as by optimizing for clicks/adverts), and the social pressures and influences that come with these by default is something that directly impacts most people for literal hours a day, and has run-on externalities that will affect the whole of society for the rest of our lives. Most people are only tangentially and occasionally affected by their numerous privacy losses.

Sure, I'm not certain in the studies showing that Facebook is negatively associated with wellbeing. I'm not certain that the degradation in conversation quality due to platforms optimizing for controversy is a real effect. I'm not certain that echo chambers preventing people from hearing moderate opinions of opposing sides is going to permanently damage public discourse. But these are not small risks, they are almost everything when it comes to humanity's ability to steer its future, and the potential impact on people's lives should not be so easily dismissed.

The loss of privacy is needed for the microtargeting used in misinformation campaigns. It is exactly FBs profiles that allowed targeted ads for fear mongering, conspiracy theories, perhaps even school shooting victims.

Similarly, Google's profiles help push people to 'engaging' content on YouTube. It just so happens that extreme claims (anorexia is good, x was a conspiracy, group y is inferior) happen to be very engaging.

Our loss of privacy has a lot of responsibility here. It has allowed for a very subtle division of the public forum.

Playing devils advocate here, i want to build my understanding out further.

My question is: So what?

If we have good privacy laws tomorrow (assume temporary magic), how does that do anything but change the modus operandi of manipulation?

wait for a large event, and then flash your ads. Similar to pre internet behavior, true. But it’s still at internet scale, and you could target via groups right?

Currently, you can split the discourse. I'd hope that the majority of people would be outraged if sandy hook denial was pushed to them for example.

If you cannot target your message, you need to take into account everyone who will hear it. This requires a more palpable message, and almost forces the adoption of a universal framework of facts.

Similarly, the profiling has lead to echo chambers. Having that fall away also helps create some universal discourse.

Sure it has.

Say I’m selling highly profitable, highly addictive opioid painkillers. Hydrocodone has been around forever, so what do you do?

You use your access to workers comp and insurance claim data to find doctors treating conditions likely to require pain treatment. Then you find populations with high densities of patients and market heavily to their physicians. You buy ads that appeal to insured people who aren’t working.

Result: $$$

The ability to generate echo chambers at scale is a direct product of the loss of privacy, even if generally voluntary in this case. Now regardless of how extreme your personal views may be, you can find a group to affiliate with where you'll probably be pretty much a moderate. This in turn drives further extremism as people fall out of touch with reality and slide further down their own distorted world view - left, right, white, black, man, woman -- it's happening to people of all persuasions.

The problem is that most people are more comfortable around people that they identify with. This naturally trends towards echo chambers as people gravitate towards 'similar' others. And this is probably unstoppable. Companies rapidly accelerated the process of it by doing everything they possibly could to drive "engagement" but in the digital age you're not going to be able to stop people from forming 'like minded' groups, regardless of whatever rules and regulations somebody might try to dream up.

Ummm, Anthony Weiner.

But more generally, how employers, insurance companies, etc trawl social media.

I agree. I am not sure that any substantial "loss of privacy" has even occurred.

Just to posit an example, Banks and Credit Bureaus have long tracked extensive information about us including where we have lived, worked, and what we have purchased.

Should we be able to have our credit history erased from Credit Bureau and Banks in the name of privacy?

Seriously. If people actually cared about privacy, let's do something about credit bureaus and insurance companies. Because I can do something about it if I don't want Facebook to know I'm friends with someone or bought something on Amazon. But I can barely do anything about credit or insurance. They literally ruin lives, cost people thousands of dollars, target the poor, have terrible security, literally sell your data, and yet everyone is all up in arms about the permissions on their photos that they voluntarily posted on Facebook.

Credit reports are nothing. Insurance companies can identify things like whether you watch porn, gamble online or go to a gym.

Yes because the process of credit evaluation is non-transparent and punishes people who choose not to take on debt and indirectly punishes people who dared not to be born in the top 2% and couldn't rebound from a personal emergency in a timely enough manner for a stratified class of creditors.

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