Comment by HenryBemis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HenryBemis | Hacker News Reader

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> people don't care about privacy

Funny you phrase it like that. When I discuss with people about 'privacy', nobody has anything to hide. When I take 2-3 minutes explaining to them why 'someone' (data markets) out there knows: what type of porn gets them off, what they shop, how much money they have, what diseases they have (that may impact their chances to a life insurance - theirs' and their kids'), their drinking habits (that may impact their premiums on car insurance), who they meet/greet/f..k..

Then their expression changes a bit. Ignorance is bliss. I awaken 1-2 people at a time. BUT (big but - sorry for the caps) "all my friends is on FB, and Chrome is such a nice browser".

> you would probably do the same

I used to know a guy who geniunely had the opinion: if it wasn't illegal to sell heroin to kids, I'd be a billionaire right now selling to all my kids, starting with my kids' friends.

Unfortunately this person has kids, voting rights, walks among us. Yes I want to be a billionaire (I'm many-many zeros away from this target). No I wouldn't sell heroin (or your kids' photos you post on social media) to anyone else. Zuck has no problem getting 13yo on Instagram, profiling them, and trading their data. So NO.

But its not the privacy itself that people care about.

The reason is people care is because this information can be used to harm them.

The reason I care about my credit card number being public is because it can be used to stole my money but If my credit card number can be public while still keeping my money belong to me then I would much prefer that.

The better way would be to make everything as public as much as possible then fixes the issue that arise due to that information being public.

I think this is an important point to make. I think most people, myself included, are fine with sharing personal information if the person i'm sharing it with isn't going to use it against me. That's always been the case dealing with people.

I think that it is clear than then you post on Facebook about my/your/someone's cancer treatment, data aggregators will mark this in your medical records. An insurer 20-30 years from now will easily correlate that my/you/someone's kid has me/you/etc as a father, and therefore have increased chances of cancer (or some other disease) and thus affect their chance to get life insurance or affect the price of premiums.

When you share with FB (imho) it is clear that you don't share with a person, but with a hungry-for-information beast. Didn't people hear about Cambridge Analytica? Is anyone so naive so as to believe that this was 'the end of information leakage' by FB? (or other similar platforms, such as Pinterest - in the case someone makes a "medicine for my X disease" table).

>and thus affect their chance to get life insurance or affect the price of premiums

So the real issue is can't get insurance/too expensive insurance, not the privacy itself.

If this is fixed then I don't care if the information being public.

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