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Comment by robertAngst | Hacker News Reader

This strong push for 'privacy' is going to have a strong pushback.

There may be some users here who need privacy, or some users who think privacy is necessary to keep whistleblowers safe.

The majority of users want fantastic service.

Privacy is niche, and not needed for everyone. We already have solutions, and have users pay for a dummy accounts.

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Fantastic service does not require giving up your privacy. There are privacy-protecting ways to do personalization, gather data for machine learning, and so on. Even advertising business models do not require that people give up their privacy.

I think we'd be silly to not recognise that there are some tradeoffs between privacy and UX. Facebook tracks your cursor for a reason, they're analysing what users do and changing the UX based on it. I can imagine wanting to look at this data using any number of filters for a/s/l/etc., and once you're cataloging enough criteria tying a session to a specific user can be done as an afterthought. I think GP is correct about most users valuing UX over privacy, unfortunately.

But this data can be collected with differential privacy, some learning can be done on-device, etc etc. There are ways to get the best of both worlds, but they require more careful engineering.

I agree that a balance can be struck, and a lot can be learned without sacrificing substantial privacy. I don't think it's the best of both worlds, though; some sacrifices must be made somewhere. Do you think the amount of information described in my prior comment (cursor movement records that can be filtered based on any demographic data from the profile that generated it) can be analysed at arbitrary points in the future without sacrificing some amount of privacy? Note that I'm not placing a value on this and saying such data should be collected, I'm just arguing that there is a tradeoff. Differential privacy systems do make such tradeoffs.

I think much of the value can be gained by collecting the data with some kind of differential privacy noise added to keep it from being traced back to any given user. But obviously data collected in this way is less useful--it may not matter, given diminishing returns, for services with enough scale, but yeah these techniques can make things harder for smaller services.

I don't know what to learn from these ideas.

This user speaks of Utopia where there is infinite engineering resources and endless profit to dig into.

Maybe I suck at business, but making profit is very hard.

The end result is the same though. Any client side tracking, privacy-friendly or not will be blocked. So many sites just use GA anyway - because some users will block regardless.

I don't want an expensive privacy service. I want free/low cost.

I have no reason for privacy, its like buying a Mini Van when you are single.

EDIT: HN is bad at discussing ideas. I suggest not downvoting people for dissent.

HN is Reddit: SV WebDev edition these days. Why is there even a downvote button? Look at this thread: lots of perfectly normal comments are greyed out because they say something involving Firefox not being perfect software. It's ridiculous. What possible purpose does a downvote button serve except to encourage this kind of behavior?

Your lack of privacy hurts other people's privacy too. You live in a society that's hurt by mass surveillance. Defending your own privacy is a moral imperative because of that.

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