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Comment by red-montaigne | Hacker News Reader

Not really. I'm in the same boat: I'm an independent who likes to get an omnivorous information diet, but I've regularly avoided looking into certain things I'm curious about because I know there will be a record of it and a bunch of data sellers providing a misleading snapshot of who I am and what I believe. What did Richelieu say? "Give me seven words spoken by an honest man and I'll find something in them to hang him?" In today's surveillance society it's intelligent to limit your footprint, which is exactly the chilling effect free speech and free society advocates are worried about. (Glenn Greenwald's "No Place to Hide" is a great read on the topic.)

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I pretty much stopped caring - in a post-snowden world where we found out that merely visiting a linux forum gets you on a list[1] I figure I'm already on a good good chunk of them.

That and a curiosity about the world and history (particularly the cold war) means just the stuff I look at on wikipedia would look awful out of context.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/nsa-targets-linux-journal-as-e...

That's the problem when you lower the floor with dragnets, you drown in your own noise.

Yeah that's one approach, you can just choose not to care. I'm sure I'm also on Linux lists and crap like that, but that doesn't mean I want to end up on a bunch of other ones. Particularly with the vehemence in American politics today, I don't want either side putting me on one of their enemies lists just because some site I signed up to check out got hacked and all of the user info got dumped. Seems easier to just check out, live my life, and try to be kind to the people in the real world around me. If I want a political discussion I'll go chat with some of my friends.

Do not think about dragnets as dragnets. Do think about them as a searchable storage of facts usable for future persecution.

Look at any authoritarian regime. Once they decide that a particular person has to be destroyed, they dig through their entire history to compile a dossier of Evil Things that person has said and done. You need searchable history for that, though. Or a lot of manpower. But databases are better for that purpose.

Similarly, if you can show that (unwanted person) said the N-word in 2004, you can probably get them destroyed today i the U.S. The hit piece just writes itself.

I think it’s not just the NSA’s list that the poster is worried about- they are worried about being associated with violent nut jobs by polite society, and getting canceled.

How successful do you think a background check service for tech startups would be that gives you a percentage rating of how racist,homophobic,etc. an applicant is.

Could pivot to an “auto-cancel” saas if you will. You could even cancel people in bulk.

Jokes aside I’m sure there would be appetite for such a thing. Under the guise of “employee safety”.

And one of the first lists to check would be Parler.

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