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Comment by throwaway13337 | Hacker News Reader

This is the wrong approach.

It doesn't address the biggest privacy concern: the government's collection and use of personal data. No restrictions there, I guess.

Information wants to be free - even when it's about you. Putting that genie back in the bottle - the right to be forgotten - creates a world that is less free.

We should be really going the other direction and not allowing these corporations to hold this data in private silos to re-enforce their monopolies. They use the force of law to hold these monopolies over the things you've written so that it's their property and not the property of the individual. That's wrong and that's granted by the government.

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I certainly agree with you, that the larger concern here has to be the government, and its overt, broad, barely regulated, data collection efforts.

I'm pretty sure Yang is the best thing to come out of this election season so far, even though I have to disagree with him on a large number of items, at least he's forcing some conversations.

> It doesn't address the biggest privacy concern: the government's collection and use of personal data.

I don't agree that this is the biggest privacy concern. In my opinion, this is just as concerning as corporate collection and use of personal data.

> We should be really going the other direction and not allowing these corporations to hold this data in private silos

We should not be allowing anyone to collect this information (without informed consent) in the first place.

I second this. As of right now, the Government is doing a lot less (with a lot more data) than private companies are. That doesn't mean we ignore them, but a bigger priority is to to nail down the corporations who have virtually no restrictions on how they use our private data.

As a singular example, right now a private corporation (Equifax) has as much say in my ability to be employed as the government (if not more).

> Information wants to be free - even when it's about you. Putting that genie back in the bottle - the right to be forgotten - creates a world that is less free.

It is accepted (I believe) that it is reasonable that federal judges and police officers don't have publicly published phone numbers, similarly people who have been stalked or threatened or doxed have demonstrated why things shouldn't always be public.

I definitely agree that private corporate data silos are no good (since they're essentially public data silos as soon as they're compromised but serve to monetize your privacy by selling it to third parties in the mean time) but I disagree that all data must be free and I am certainly not offended by people's desire to have a modicum of privacy in the modern world...

All that said if the monetary value of this data is removed by restricting private usage of it then we'll likely see the equation of value vs. cost for companies storing data shift back to preferring to store as little as possible. Disallowing private data silos may effectively restore a measure of privacy to most people by removing anyone's motivation to collect data.

> All that said if the monetary value of this data is removed by restricting private usage of it then we'll likely see the equation of value vs. cost for companies storing data shift back to preferring to store as little as possible. Disallowing private data silos may effectively restore a measure of privacy to most people by removing anyone's motivation to collect data.

on the other hand, the first few years of having everyone's search history be public could be pretty chaotic...

Well, as we are finding out, freedom results in people being hurt. If you limit the freedom, you can prevent people from getting hurt.

Is freedom worth the harm it enables? That is a choice everyone has to make. Most people are willing to give up a lot of freedom in exchange for mitigating harm.

Generally yes.

When someone says "I give up this freedom" it's often because they don't use it or it doesn't affect them. The problem is that what they are really saying is "I give up this freedom for myself and everyone else."

This is bad when you have a large group willing to give up a freedom they already don't use or care about that only affects a minority of people. The problem comes that a different, overlapping large group is willing to give up another freedom and now the minority affected by that loss was part of the first large group. It's easy for this to continue until everyone has lost a freedom they enjoyed because they signed up with some large group, often thinking they were 'right'.

TL;DR: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

> Is freedom worth the harm it enables?

Yes.

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