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Comment by potamic | Hacker News Reader

This is why the argument that lack of privacy is justified for good intentions is moot. Time moves on, ideals change and people in charge get replaced. There is no guarantee that principles held when collecting information will remain. Every single piece of information about you can and will be used against you by people in power if it hampers their agenda. The only reasonable thing to do when it comes to privacy is to share nothing, unless the situation absolutely needs it. Anonymous identity is very critical for the functioning of a healthy society and the biggest evil Google and Facebook have done was to really erase this off the internet.

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This reminds me of the fate of Jews in occupied Holland in WW2. Prior to the war, religious affiliation was collected by the Dutch authorities for tax exemption purposes - perfectly benign and harmless. Those same records of course fell right into the hands of the Gestapo soon after the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, providing them with a convenient list of names to round up for deportation to the camps.

The Jewish Community in Germany uses the state assisted church tax collection. It seems that convenience beats history in that case.

The nazism did not took issue with Jewish religion as much as they too issue with Jewish race.

Not being affiliated with church did not saved people.

No. The reason people don't have anonymity is that people don't want anonymity (or, rather, want the benefits of non-anonymity).

It's easy to point fingers at large-scale evil-doers, but none of those exist in a vacuum, do they?

Do we perhaps want stricter laws to protect people's anonymity? Cause I thought we wanted less laws, in order to allow for greater freedom.

Ah, I got it, we want balance. But just a little tilted this way, if that's okay.

Hard to please.

Its so true. People dont have ideas they want to fight for anymore. If its doing ok for them its cool. Thats also the large majority of chinese citizen is "cool" with their government

>Cause I thought we wanted less laws, in order to allow for greater freedom.

Needless strawman. No one calling for more privacy is calling for smaller government.

> It's easy to point fingers at large-scale evil-doers, but none of those exist in a vacuum, do they?

Thats the point potamic made the focus is on the evil large-scale doers do not the potential evil of their tech outside of their control, an argument large scale doers tend to hand wave as not going to happen.

Now that it has happened there is no point debating laws as evil doers are not controlled by laws.

This is the argument privacy advocates have made for years and now it has happened it's too late to protect people by changing laws.

Seeing a problem before it happens and presenting a solution to prevent that problem is not being hard to please, it's the exact opposite.

Wanting to weaken privacy so you can invade peoples privacy but not have other invade that persons privacy is being hard to please and its the attitude politicians take and its the root cause of this problem.

Privacy is not necessarily anonymity and privacy and non-anonymity aren’t at odds.

I can be perfectly happy to publish public thoughts under my real name but take objection to large scale tracking, collection of data from private conversations, and back doors to my personal devices.

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