Once it was easy to be obscure, but technology has ended that

It's very much up for me now.

Do you not speak to your neighbors!?

Sounds similar to Zillow lowering homes' estimated values (zestimates) to encourage subscriptions with which you can contest their number.

You have a point but somehow that just makes you the bad one. Perhaps if you exposed everyone's data but then they call it malware/virus/hacker group/rogue nation/terrorist.

All that happens is scary privacy themed movies get made.

Someone needs to reinvent services with privacy in mind and wait for the next generation.

That reminds me of this article where authorities deemed to OK to go through peoples trash... so Journalists went through those same authorities trash:

https://www.wweek.com/portland/article-1616-rubbish.html-2

Dave Brin's answer: privacy is lost, but we should make sure that it is lost by all equally. We must eliminate all avenues that grant privacy to any class that is otherwise favored.

They will most likely end up shooting the messenger.

I would also add that some of the most compelling rationale, at least in the US, would likely cite oppressive regimes that seem distant geographically and historically.

“That would never happen here!” is the thinking.

> What's your most convincing argument for why an average person should care more?

Laymen Argument 1:

Mark Zuckerburg who has majority control of the largest source of private data in the world bought the two plots of land next to him for privacy reasons.

Laymen Argument 2:

Forward me all of your emails if privacy isn't an issue. crickets

The average person doesn't care about these because it doesn't affect them right now, but it's a "boil the frog" situation...you won't know you're getting boiled to death until it's too late.

I don’t think this is accurate. People are often frightened of unlikely things so long as they feel they can do something about it. But when a threat seems incomprehensible and they feel powerless to do anything about it (at least partially bc they do not understand it), they will shut it out and shut down rather than confront it, because it overwhelms their ability to cope with it emotionally and paralyzes them.

Incomprehensibility and powerlessness are overwhelming emotions. They flood the nervous system, so people shut them out in order to be able to continue to function on a daily basis. It’s the same reason why people continue to ignore climate change.

It’s not a rational problem, or a probabilistic one. It’s a problem of emotion. It’s a trauma problem.

There is no convincing argument. The "I have nothing to hide" defense is one that can't be toppled until they experience something that illuminates it for them (something I haven't seen happen), argument/discussion is worthless. My family, friends, and co-workers (developers) all use this. They do not care, and those of us who do are, to them, weirdly concerned about something trivial in their mind.

Plenty that's extremely bad is already happening as a result of privacy violations. Probably affecting most of us. Trouble is they're invisible.

For one example, we saw with Cambridge Analytica that political advertising can be tuned to your personal hot button issues. Those worried by immigration can be sent an outright (and outrageous) lie that remaining in the EU will result in all of Turkey moving to the UK. Those with different interests/concerns got different ads.

Turns out many of them were illegal too. No one knew until too late because it was invisible to all except the advertiser, Facebook (in this case) and recipient.

Until it becomes visible - it's really hard to make people care, or realise. Perhaps a few on the receiving end of the brexit/CA issue realised, if they remember the ads they saw, and read one of the many follow up stories. Like anything algorithmic, unless you a-b test how do you know what you saw that others didn't, what you aren't seeing, or where it discriminates?

Keep this up and we could easily lose most of the progress of the 20th century, invisibly.

How would they even know if it affected them?

It’s not easy to see that you’re paying more online, or being offered different ads and products because of all the personal data collected about you.

For most Americans, the major privacy concerns are (or ought to be) around speeding and other more-or-less minor moving violations, illegal drug shipments, and copyright violations. For speeding etc, potential impacts are mainly fines, higher insurance rates, and potential license loss.

Illegal drug shipments for older people are mainly offshore pharmacies. And that's not heavily penalized, with confiscation and warning letters being the norm. Otherwise it's recreational drugs. And apparently that's also rarely prosecuted, except for dealers.

It also seems that copyright violations aren't being heavily prosecuted. I guess that the MPAA figured out that bad PR was worse than people pirating.

More generally, there's the issue of being gamed by well informed sellers. Basically paying more for stuff that they know we really want. And getting tricked into buying stuff that we don't really need. Also, electing candidates that we don't really want ;)

Freedom and Privacy are tightly coupled. One cannot truly be free if one's every action is monitored or manipulated. That is why the right to privacy was recognized by the US Supreme Court as inferred from the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments even though privacy was never mentioned in the Constitution.

> What's your most convincing argument for why an average person should care more? Explain it to me like I'm 5.

You're going to pay more than me every time you buy something because your profile indicates you aren't as price sensitive.

That's just commercial surveillance though.

Unfortunately, if your "paranoia" successfully protects you, you can't prove that nothing bad happened because of it.

The world has a terrible habit of not counting bad things that should have happened but didn't, even in cases where we know with a fair degree of confidence that it should have gone worse.

Prime examples:

Y2K is often remembered as "Ha! Can you believe they ever thought that was going to be a real problem!"

It was predicted the Kuwait oil fires would burn for years and be a global environmental catastrophe. They were put out in six months.

We didn't celebrate this amazing success on par with the hand wringing we had done about the expected outcome. No one danced in the streets at this glorious news that we averted disaster globally. Instead, it was a minor footnote in stories with more drama.

Your trove of personal data has monetary value. With a few pieces of info, your identity can be stolen. If a company gets hacked or an employee siphons data, it's sold and used, with you facing severe consequences and maybe them too

There have been a lot of data breaches in companies. If a company has information about you there is a decent chance it will become public sometime in the future. Google knows who you are and everything you've searched for and almost every website you've looked at. Facebook knows who you are and every picture and profile that you've ever looked at. Someone could leak this information and then everyone will know what a horrid little pervert you are.

I'm not sure 5 year olds share the same fears as adults so think of it more as an explain like I'm 15.

Yes, it seems most people are unwilling to give up a concrete benefit to avoid a hypothetical threat. I think the privacy threat will only seem concrete when a higher percentage of people are expressing concern over it. I have not found a short, compelling argument that works for everyone, or even most everyone. The best approach I know is to tailor an argument to the individual in order to present the privacy threat they might most care about. Even with a tailored argument, I would guess that less than 20% of nontechnical people are swayed by what I say. I take hope in the fact that there is evidence societal norms can be changed by a surprisingly small minority[1].

[1] https://ndg.asc.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Centola...

The ELI5 I always tend to fall back on is the example of the Dutch Jewry. The tale goes that The Netherlands had a beautiful list of all its citizens, their names, addresses and their religious statusses neatly tucked away in a locked filing cabinet behind a locked door in the town hall.

Come 1940 the Nazis had a beautiful "leaked database" to use as a reference.

I think the average person cares about privacy either in a localised context or a pathological context.

They don't want their neighbours to see inside their house, they don't want all their friends know what some of their friends know about them, and they might not want their spouses to know what sort of porn they watch. Simple enough. They also understand they don't want to live in a DDR era surveillance by a central government, one that is obviously a bad and violent actor.

But tracking of data on the internet and refining personal information to build a profile, an identity is sort of impersonal. It's not local or pathological. There is no such context for privacy (or the lack of it).

The person doesn't have a relationship towards these unknown surveying and tracking parties and, conversely, they really don't know these people in the social sense. People might realise that their social media posts, shopping habits, and browsing habits might be collected under a profile somewhere but for the most part that's just a bunch of data somewhere: there's no evidence that this profile would change the behaviour of other people who are relevant in the person's life.

Being a programmer, I have to admit I don't know myself how bad things could turn, for instance, in my own case. For the most part, even I don't see any immediate threats with Google or Facebook having some bits of my personal life stored online or Amazon having a good history of what sort of things I've so far needed. What keeps me from being liberal in sharing stuff is merely my nerd instinct: I just know I don't want to expose too much surface to the outside unnecessarily. Hence incognito windows, Firefox containers, ad blockers, uBlock, and other stuff. But fifteen years of Google and ten years of Facebook have not really had any unwanted influence in my real (i.e. physical) life. I also grew up in an internet where pseudonyms were the norm so it's always an exception to give a service my real name.

Data breach and identity theft? The risk is fairly low and the latter happens even without breaches into online personal data.

Custom pricing? I hunt for prices in private windows so that I'm less likely to trigger an interest for an item, and potentially higher prices, in the browser that has links to my personal profile.

Sensitive information? I don't think my blood test results or list of surgical operations would stand out much: surely I have things in that area I don't want all my friends or relatives to know but worrying about that would have to mean the information I have stored on Google and some medical providers' profiles would have to become publicly accessible and my friends or relatives would have to know to look for them and then identify my records to find out. That's a long bridge to be built, I don't think it's a particularly realistic worry.

Do I have something to hide? As much as I hate that argument and while there surely are things I don't advertise and my friends don't know about they could just ask and I'd probably tell them. If a stranger sat next to me and told me something about my life I thought only I knew is both unexpected and a bit hypothetical. The privacy would now have become local and I'd probably be more interested in the social context, i.e. what would the stranger want to approach me like that and what would be the price. On the other hand, if all he has is information then all he can do is reveal it. I don't think any of that information would be detrimental. Uncomfortable, maybe, but not the end of the world. And I'll be dead anyway in fifty years.

Connectivity surveillance? I'm not particularly worried that my ISP or government will see who I've called. They aren't interested in me personally. My frieds might be but the chance of them getting access to that information is slim. Again I don't like the idea of logging connectivity but I personally don't see the downsides either.

Most of the stuff online is also quite transient. The value of me buying a particular tool ten years ago is only so much. I'll block ads anyway.

I am perhaps an average person in that sense. I know there's a strong sense of "not right" in collecting so much information, and as a programmer I know how data can be massaged into information but I can't see credible enough threats on a personal level in that area to change much of even my own behaviour.

I'm not surprised that average people aren't all freaked out about tracking and online privacy issues.

Your mums bobs and vegana pictures siphoned off the smartphone and plastered all over pronhub, this argument seems to work rather well.

Would Martin Luther King have enough privacy in 2019 to organize the civil rights movement? Would Ghandi have enough privacy to lead the Indian independence movement?

I hope the answer is still yes, but once the answer becomes no then everyone cares.

That’s my attempt to explain.

Even five year olds are taught not to talk to strangers and not to tell them anything.

But somehow there seems to be a cognitive dissonance, where people are more than happy to share absolutely everything to anyone, just because it's happening in comfort and privacy of their home, while typing into a device they own.

Let's say your wife is looking for a job, but you plan on having kids some time in the future. That data is collected by either facebook, whatsapp, your mobile phone provider or something else. Or her data collecting menstrual calendar isa sending back info (yes this actually exists).

Now, it's illegal to ask that in an inteview, but the boss might buy that data, and your wife will never get a job.

Let's say you are a supporter of a political movement that is not mainstream, all of that data can be used to exclude you from society one small step at a time.

The holocaust was in many ways enabled by mass surveillance. How about we start there. It was done mostly manually, but even something as trivial as census data from an occupied country likely killed an unimaginable amount of people. Then of course you had the eastern block where the authorities would've been wetting their pants at the surveillance capability of a modern private individual, let alone a corp or government. These are not theoretical questions, we've played this game before and now we have really big toys.

I usually link to this 2006 column by Bruce Schneier – it is both lucid and succinct:

The Eternal Value of Privacy

https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/

> What's your most convincing argument for why an average person should care more? Explain it to me like I'm 5.

The data leak of HIV patients' identities which happened in the UK a couple of years ago. Think you'd struggle to find anyone who thought "Oh, that's not a problem - noone really needs privacy". I think most people also understand that there should be general enough rules to cover all situations like that.

The challenge in my view isn't explaining why privacy is good and needed. It's convincing them that their privacy is actually at risk.

You could never completely cut people from your life.

That awful ex-partner knows where you work, when & where you're out with friends. They can show up.

I think there's another factor to consider: people recognize that you can't put the cat back in the bag. The modern world just makes it far too easy to track people, find people, spy on people, etc. and you can try regulating that away but the technology doesn't stop existing and, in fact, just keeps getting better and cheaper. In other words: it is a lost cause.

No, the "problem" is that it's not even an issue. If the average person wanted to avoid being recorded in public, then we would find ways to. But there's no point "spreading awareness" if you don't have a convincing explanation for what exactly the actual problem is.

Lol there are so many fake loading bars on that sites ‘get full profile info’ feature

I did submit a variant of the comment (to fit their character requirements), but I don't think it got approved because quite a few new comments have been posted since then. Perhaps they have a particularly long backlog, though; it's only been about two hours so I don't want to jump to any conclusions yet.

Edit: Given the large stream of comments that have now been posted on the article I think I can safely conclude mine didn't pass the manual approval process. So much for "welcoming on-topic commentary, criticism and expertise."

I understand your point and I agree that individuals need to value privacy, but I also think it's important to recognize that the average individual on HN is much more technologically literate than most. I would posit that most people do care about their privacy, but that most people aren't aware how exposed they really are. You could make the argument that being aware about what information you're exposing is the threshold for caring about your privacy, but the reality is that it's impossible to cover all of your bases and tech companies, and now NYT, are fully exploiting that to their advantage. The average individual isn't aware of how much specific information is collected when they use a credit card, when they connect to a cellular network, when they open a webpage with trackers, etc. Hell, Mr. Sulzberger in [1] admitted himself that NYT isn't even fully aware of what happens to the reader information they sell and whether it ends up in responsible hands.

It's exhausting and impossible to care about privacy today. You can care about privacy today and still end up with all of the same information exposed as someone who couldn't care less. The responsibility doesn't fall on the individual, it falls on the companies that continuously scrape every piece of metadata possible. That's why I can't take NYT's Privacy Project seriously, because in [1] they justify their data collection methods by essentially saying "Well, everyone else is doing it, too! Look at these other publications and companies that also collect data!" instead of taking the opportunity to be transparent and setting a standard. It's disappointing and makes me question the motives behind the project.

A limited-run newsletter, even. Isn't that called a database?

Those things are happening though. The GDPR has only recently come in and the average person is starting to realize how data collection affects them in ways like manipulating elections and data leaks. Until recently these privacy intrusions have only been a theoretical risk and most people don't care about theoretical risks until they become real risks.

feels like society is becoming more and more a side-effect of business

This is not an expectation of privacy. This is a negative liberty from constant surveillance in public. This has something that has implicitly existed forever. Perhaps it needs to be explicitly stated now. And here I am not even advocating for that freedom, but simply for that freedom to be ephemeral in retrospect. Say after 2-10 years the data is destroyed.

Hoarding is keeping worthless stuff without a plan for what to do with it. Google, OTOH, has a solid plan for what to do with this voice data. (Use it to train better models that do a better job of recognizing your voice.)

I think English would be fine.

It's hard to imagine a scenario where future historians can't even translate 2019 English. That's either an apocalypse layered over an apocalypse, or a length of time beyond any human comprehension - tens of thousands of years - of dark ages. You need to be carving in stone or baked clay in the desert to hit time spans that long.

Do you mean encryption or do you think that data formats are complex and will be lost?

The latter seems pretty unlikely.

(I'm talking about decoding, the fragility of storage is for sure an issue)

I don't know, some of the most interesting and enlightening things we learn about past civilizations is through the mundane.

>Future historians don't care about who was in line in the bakery this morning etc.

They do when it turns out that a serial killer was in that line. Tracking exactly what that killer did leading up to the killing spree would be very interesting to them.

But it's very hard to track 1 person retroactively. Unless, of course, there's a nation-wide surveillance system in place.

I'm not advocating for it. I'm just saying that the parent is correct in that historians would love this information.