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Comment by dingdingdanggg | Hacker News Reader

Because the people who built Facebook or Twitter don’t do that, right? Let’s be serious.

I'm not trying to be a dick and you're obviously free to do what you wish (in case you wonder, I have not downvoted you). But this attitude has absolutely ruined the web. Despite all the improvements in web technologies, browsers and even bandwidth, I have noticeably more difficulty consuming good information today. This is 100% because of lax attitudes to user privacy.

Please stop. :)

A few months ago, I had someone tell me on the programming subreddit that, while they were very concerned about privacy and Google Chrome, they tried Firefox but went back to Chrome because (and I am not making this up) the font kerning in Firefox was slightly suboptimal in certain situations.

That's what we're fighting against. This was someone on a technical forum who understood the privacy issues at play. But they valued their own privacy so little that they were willing to trade it for slightly improved font kerning. In short, I worry that we're well and truly fucked.

I think what you're really seeing is how much people value a good user experience, not how little they value privacy. Killing it on the UX end has always been a thing that OSS projects and software has struggled with and lack of growth there is, IMO, part of what has gotten us to where we are.

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