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Comment by burnaway | Hacker News Reader

"We have lost this argument in the past so what are we talking about" is a dangerous attitude in this context. Helping the 'average citizen' understand the extent of surveillance and facing the consequences is an ongoing process. Public awareness is still very low about these issues, but the norms are changing - many, including myself are working hard on framing the issue in a way that reaches wider audiences. We cannot just put up our hands and accept that this battle is lost and the power imbalance is too entrenched to be changed. If you are interested in recent studies that demonstrate that people who become aware of the privacy issues do care about them, email me.

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I just feel like when you have a problem like this, where the interests of business and state are aligned (data collection is useful for both), taking a principled stance allows people to marginalize you.

Obviously, people don't like invasive data collection. People don't like wars either. People generally have the kind of common sense that institutions and businesses lack.

My feeling is that you don't win fights like this by making a principled stance, then trying to get the public on board. You do it by finding wedge issues, where the argument is so strong that opposition is very difficult, then using victories there to build momentum for the next fight. That's what the civil rights movement did. That's what you have to do if you're fighting from a weaker position, and I think privacy will always be a weak value in western-style democracies because there are just so many compelling incentives for actors to erode privacy, and the threat of losing privacy is generally abstract, and only felt by already marginalized groups.

I do not understand where you get the impression that the interest of business and state are aligned when it comes to data collection. I would say that in a lot of cases, it is rather the opposite. You seem to assume that the state always has access to the data collected. That is likely not true. There are laws that limit state´s use of data without cause. That seems to be missing for Big Tech, which is why we need regulation.

A few years ago the Norwegian Spy Chief was taking questions from the media. He actually pointed out that we should be more worried about the data collection of private companies than that of the Norwegian state. Their data collection was regulated and small in scope. Big tech data collection is seemingly neither.

Data collected by Big Tech can be misused by others. In many ways this is a significant security risk. Not just from data breaches, but also that people can be manipulated in groups. This is a significant problem and the easiest way to resolve it is to stop the tracking and ban surveillance-based ads.

Well, a state is the entity that has sovereignty in a given country. So in principle, it always has access to all of the resources of that country, even though in practice it's bound by all sorts of laws and customs. Also in practice, these laws and customs tend to have exceptions in exigent circumstances.

Personally, I think dividing between the state and business is simplistic. Most businesses and most states have a symbiotic and codependent relationship, that is more or less explicit depending on the country you're talking about, but that's by the by. In practice, states generally have access to collected data through subpeonas.

I do not know which country you come from and maybe what you describe is correct in your country. I can say that it is not in my countries, Norway and Iceland and this has not been my experience running an international company either.

In any case, I think mixing the two is not helpful in any shape or form. What we need is to regulate what private companies can do. I think that is enough scope for this particular discussion and I think this is such an important matter that it needs to be addressed.

Unless you're a sheep farmer or something (in which case, you still rely on the state for security) you need an enormous number of state services to run even a very simple business, but on a more basic level, property rights are defined and guaranteed by the state, currency is produced and given value by the state, employment relations and legal structures also, and so on.

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