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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

> No one sane would ever want all their relatives, friends, work colleagues, and neighbors

I'd happily share basically all of that information with that specific group of people - except maybe my neighbor that keeps reporting me to the city, they don't need to know my life, but if in turn I could know who was googling city ordinances in the middle of the night it might make up for it.

At worst I get a funny look for something I googled in the middle of the night?

To your point, it's 100% the government I'm worried about. They've got legal and lethal authority to do far worse than a weird look.

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> They've got legal and lethal authority to do far worse than a weird look.

Society scares me more. The government has the authority, but society has the power and the inclination to weaponise it. The government would never bother reacting to anything that RMS said but people did.

Society scares me more

Agreed. For example, it's unlikely a government agency is going to care about your personal web page talking about how you're open to theories about UFOs. But a potential employer may decide not to hire you because your mind is open to the possibility. Or worse, an employment screening company's "algorithm" will score you lower because of it.

You realize the government is made of people, right?

Not really. The government is more of a system that's run by people. The government doesn't change much even if all the people running it change.

But how would you trust any company to properly respect who you share stuff with? There's a multitude of anti-patterns that make some things public already with social media.

I think we should all be looking at this as either they're getting -all- of your data and sharing it with -everyone- (because that means more $$$) or they're NOT getting your data and they CANT share it cuz they don't have it.

We cannot trust companies to respect our privacy because it goes against their core value of turning a profit.

turning a profit depends to some extent on our trust, so we can expect companies to do some good for us too

Either they sell the data, or they keep it protected as a fuck you to google (aka apple) or they potentially get a data leak because they aren't following best practices in the slightest (aka Experian).

I remember being out of college and finally being able to buy adobe products to do photography and then Adobe got hacked and my un/pw was out in the wild. It was safer to pirate their stuff and trust some crazy keygen software that's definitely doing something nefarious cuz at least I could run that in a VM.

It appears you and I have very different relationships with work colleagues...

If you Facebook friend your work colleagues and introduce your wife then they already have easy access to what you like and who you're sleeping with, no?

Search history and medical info would be more concerning than that information, on average, I would guess.

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