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Comment by idop | Hacker News Reader

The general public doesn't have the knowledge or even imagination to understand that sharing your information with nameless/faceless organizations may have downsides re: privacy. The others have been brainwashed well enough to believe that only criminals need privacy, so they don't care. By now using the "I have nothing to hide" example is cliche but it's literally the response I _always_ get when I bring up privacy concerns. Takes me about 12 seconds to prove to them how wrong they are.

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The general public may have the knowledge and imagination - they just don't give a shit. Life is complicated enough to be worried about someone being able to match my face to my name. As if this weren't possible today with social media. Who knows?

Am I really going to change whatever is going on in my day because maybe, someday, some evil corporations will match my likes on twitter to my real-life preferences?

I'm aware of all that can be done with the data. I program for a living and have an 'internet' business. It's just that the claims made here in HN make it sound as if everyone is retarded for giving away their 'privacy'.

We are asking the general population to give up tangible benefits for hypothetical downsides. It's just not convincing enough for people to change their habits. Get in their shoes. HNers mostly can't because we cannot imagine what it's like to see technical details as a burden. Most people don't have the knowledge to make safeguarding their privacy 'a breeze' (multiple identities/passwords/oss/avoiding gmail/etc).

What argument do you use to prove them wrong?

I usually say something to the tune of "everyone has something to hide, that's why we put clothes on; that's why we don't go around broadcasting our medical test results; that's why we don't reveal our salaries and benefits to our colleagues (or anyone); that's why we don't give our address to anyone that asks for it. It doesn't mean we've done something bad or we're criminals, it just means we're human. But if you have a gmail account, you've probably given one of the world's largest corporation all this knowledge."

Usually the medical test thing is enough to shut them up.

Anyway there are many such example arguments around the internet, just DuckDuckGo "nothing to hide". There's even a Wikipedia article about it [1].

Edit: Oh, I often give Uber's deleted posts about how they know their users had one-night stands as an example too. See [2] and [3] for one of the deleted posts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument [2] https://money.cnn.com/2014/11/25/technology/uber-prostitutes... [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20140827195715/http://blog.uber....

These arguments are exactly why most people I meet say they don't care how much info they give to random apps. They assume since Google has all the info already anyway, why should they care if one more nameless faceless corp gets it? Plus companies have had all this personal data for a long time now and nothing bad has happened.

The only argument I've had even a little success with is "it makes it easier for identity thieves to get and use your CC / bank info". That usually get a pause before "oh well my bank has fraud protection".

I feel it's very easy to counter this argument too. A person can choose to trust specific persons/organizations/governments with their personal information. For example they'll share secrets with some friends but not with all of them. But from there to go to "oh well I've given it to one <insert entity here> I might as well just give it to all of them" is very naive and I would even say defeatist.

Defeatist in what sense though? No one I've spoken to feels "defeated" by paying for social media with their data. Most people have experienced exactly zero negative consequences for giving out all their personal info in exchange for access to social media or whatever app is currently popular. So why bother fighting every app for control of info that's already out there and has caused no harm in the past?

I definitely agree with this, although even for the "zero negative consequences" argument I usually counter with "one of your friends loaded all their contacts into some app that shows them who's calling them, and now you're bombarded with text messages offering you black market loans, tons of marketing calls, etc." (which is actually true in Israel).

Anyway, I was going with "defeatist" mostly because it reminded me of an attitude I personally sometimes display when it comes to being overweight: "I already ate above my maintenance window today, I might as well just eat everything in the pantry and fridge and order some family-size pizzas". So, "I've already failed once, might as well keep failing."

The average person does not understand the implications of their actions vis-à-vis IT companies and their personal information.

Moreover, their actions do not affect only themselves, but also all of the people with whom they regularly interact, regardless of whether or not those people themselves have “chosen” to “opt in”.

There is only one solution to this problem, and it is political in nature.

Side note, but sharing salaries with colleagues is actually a good idea, due to the unfairness that can arise from salaries being kept secret.

Example article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/smarter-living/pay-secrec...

Interesting article and interesting opinion. I particularly like this quote: "Employers can get away with paying workers less when those workers don’t talk about money." I find it to be very true.

Your links are truncated.

Oops, my bad, fixed.

Neither of the links to deleted blog posts appear to be working

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