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Comment by MrGando | Hacker News Reader

It's a bit sad to read so many "I don't discuss anything illegal, so this doesn't affect me" arguments here.

That's not really how it works, and if we take history as an example, most of what you say can be used for profiling and targeting potentially. So no, the above argument misses the point, completely.

We can do better as educated folks. A good starting point to learn bout privacy would be to read -at least a bit- of Daniel J. Solove's "The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age". Also, learning more about history and what happened with PII (personable identifiable information) in WW2 is important.

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>We can do better as educated folks.

There's nothing uneducated about having a differentiated view on privacy, which this blog post has not, it's mostly just an incoherent rant.

There's nothing wrong with not having any expectation of privacy for discourse that is supposed to be public. I don't care if my open source development discussions are public because they're intended for a public audience. Same goes for any discussion I have on a discord.

People with an educated mindset are able to discern what information deserves what level of privacy, rather than larping as privacy advocates to stick it to the man or whatever the motivation is.

I'm not seeing those arguments. Whose argument are you referring to?

Despite being a strong privacy advocate, I didn't find the post particularly compelling. For the vast majority of open source projects, discussion of anything illegal would be considered off topic, and there is no expectation of privacy since all discussion is public record. Having those discussions being public and searchable is a valuable feature.

Does that mean I am against good tools that enable private discourse (like Signal)? Of course not! Some open source projects probably have a need for private discussion channels. I'm all for them using them. But to then extrapolate from that: "don't use Discord to discuss your open source JS widget library" doesn't make sense to me.

I was just reading the discussion happening around the post and where people are going with this. I agree with you Jared, and I didn't find the post particularly compelling as well.

I should have been more clear. I just read through the comments here in HN and tried to make an observation about the level of the conversation that the HN community (is it a community?) seems to be having. Mainly wanted to express that I hoped that we could all learn more about privacy in this day and age, given that it's (or should be) a fundamental matter that relates to most of what we work on these days (at least as people working in tech).

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