Hacker News Reader

Comment by admax88qqq | Hacker News Reader

That's a little different thought and I think you know it.

There's a difference between information that government and big tech is scraping and storing, vs information that is publicly available to literally any random person online to scrape.

Both are problems, but those are different discussions and we started with talking about the issue of truly publicly available information. I think that's an interesting topic that merits its own discussion without falling into the surveillance discussion once again.

View on HN

A little different, yes, but what I'm saying is that it's not substantially different. Once data is collected, it won't be uncollected, and all it takes is one hack to permanently turn a private database into a public one. And the data that's being collected in these private databases is often justified on the grounds that it's not private information--i.e., if you're outside, you have no expectation of privacy. So in that sense it is "truly public" information. But what I'm saying is that the meaning of public/private has fundamentally changed because of the kind of differences of scale we're talking about here. In other words, there was a degree of implicit privacy afforded by the level of effort required to catalog and search "public" data. Whether that data comes from public or private databases is, I think, not particularly relevant.

Sure, yes, I don't disagree with what your saying. It's just that corporate surveillance is like the favourite topic on HN right now. Almost every topic gets shifted to being yet another debate about corporate surveillance.

There is an interesting discussion to be had about what it means for information to be public, since public information is also now _searchable_ information, which never used to be the case. What are the implications for that when it comes to laws about what constitutes "public" information, and social norms on what we share publicly.

But once again instead of discussing that conversation, we're dragged back into the corporate and government surveillance, yet again.

The former can become the latter pretty easily though and without any consent through both illegal (hacking) and legal (company acquisition) ways. Corporate surveillance very much is a part of the problem and you can't talk about one without talking about the other.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com