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Comment by MereInterest | Hacker News Reader

Suppose a hundred people have my contact information. If any one of those hundred people decide that Facebook gets access to their phone, then Facebook gets my information. The "vote" of pro-facebook counts 100x that of a vote against facebook.

This is not to say that I condone corporate assassination, just to say that your appeal to the majority is woefully inaccurate.

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All that proves is that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy wrt your phone number. Any piece of information that has to be disseminated to untrusted parties to be of any use (like a phone number or email address) is by definition not private.

Or anything else that goes in an address book entry associated with your phone number.

Like your full name, job title, employer, email address, physical address, date of birth, social media profiles, family relations... the list goes on.

All of that associated information is often stored alongside your phone number. If one person you know does that, and also uses a facebook property and shares their address book through that (e.g. whatsapp), facebook has all that information about you.

If you're curious, check the list of additional fields you can add to a contact in your address book for how much Facebook could get about you

None of those are private info. And if they are, why does your contact know it?

My contact knows my name, job title and employer because they’re a colleague. There is no public record of my employment. It is private information.

How do I keep it from Facebook if my colleague uses WhatsApp, by simply opting out from using Facebook myself?

Again, you have a misguided mental model of what it means for something to be private information. If several of your colleagues know your job title and employer then you have already surrendered control over the dissemination of those pieces of information to them and they are no longer private.

I feel like there's a line between private and public information that's getting lost here. Maybe 'non-public'? Just because I've shared something with someone (by necessity, in some cases - they work for the same employer as me, so they know I work here) doesn't mean it's public information.

Or to follow that on, if several people see what medication you've purchased in a shop, is that information now public information? Has the expectation of privacy gone out of the window because it was witnessed by another person? Does that then justify that information being shared with 1+ corporations to add to their profile of you?

I'd definitely agree with that, and think that is what esoterica is missing. I don't think it is reasonable to have a strict binary line between public and private, because there exist many gradations. If I am in my home, I can reasonably expect that nobody is going to be watching through my windows with a telescope from a hundred yards away. If I am at the White House, I can reasonably expect that my every movement is going to be tracked. If I am at the grocery store, it is somewhere in-between. People can see me, what I am buying, and what I look at, but that is transient information.

This transient information is the category that modern surveillance is destroying. I think this is a useful category, as it allows for less stress of interaction, as each interaction is only relevant for a few days. Previously, it decayed over time as people forgot, or as tapes were overwritten. Soon, we are going to need mandatory data expiration policies to maintain this category of things that are public for a short time, and private afterward.

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