Hacker News Reader

You can read the car plate of cars passing in front of you. It is public information. If you can easily gather the location of all cars at any time, it becomes a big privacy problem. You can identify husbands cheating...

View on HN

Indeed. I can't help thinking that the fact that some piece of tech makes a qualitative change like this means that there's some fundamental flaw somewhere with the way we associate a person with a public record or identifier. But I'm not really sure what that flaw is, or what to do about it.

Nobody is sure how to solve it because the problem is with people and the culture we have built around having actual privacy in the past. Technology has essentially robbed us of it, which is problematic as technology solves lots of other problems so we just cant get rid of it.

This is really similar to the music industry and the problem of piracy. Bits are easy to copy and hard to prevent the copy of.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com