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Comment by sixothree | Hacker News Reader

There are other examples author could have used - google tracking location of every android user at all times, to improve maps of course.

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This is easy to disable. I enabled it after covid struck and found that nowadays the data has extremely low granularity.

It's easy for any individual user who is reading HN and cares enough to spend time setting up their own device (possibly including installing a custom ROM if you don't trust Google's checkboxes).

It's not easy to get most everyone to disable it such that it is no longer the societal condition. Since that is the level at which we're discussing things, that is what is important.

It's easy enough for any individual who cares. Even if you personally struggle with that sort of thing, it's not hard to find someone to do it for you. But the fact is most people don't care because some corporation who knows me only as user #24601 having location data indicating I spent 20 minutes in or around a Barnes and Noble doesn't negatively affect me the way that my neighbor taking pictures of me while I shower does.

This is a blind assertion that conflates "caring" with knowing enough to act, and has become less compelling as time goes on. The only way we could unbiasedly poll whether people "care" is if the phone setup process popped up fully-informing Yes/No questions. As it stands, defaults are powerful and people simply do not know how they can control their data being leaked - the average person thinks that GPS satellites track their location.

On the contrary, it is a blind assertion that those who do not act only do so specifically out of a lack of knowledge. If people cared about a problem, they could look up solutions, or look up people who could solve it for them, or people who could solve it for them would come knocking on their door, offering to solve their problem for them with the expectation they'll say yes.

Talk to 1000 random people, take all the time you want, bring any supporting material you want, how much of their hard earned money could you convince them, on average, to pay you to solve this problem for them? What is the value of having this issue magically disappear? For the vast majority of people, I doubt they'ed be willing to pay much if anything, which is equivalent to apathy.

As I said, in the median person's model of the world GPS satellites are tracking everyone's location. You're essentially assuming that when talking to someone, they will automatically trust me when I describe the details of the problem they have and trust me when I tell them how they can (partially) solve it. In reality, even people that acknowledge there is a problem still will not trust a solution from a random person - rather they will become defensive and engage the cognitive dissonance. People generally become convinced of problems and solutions either of their own volition or by social proof.

Articles condemning big tech are popular for a reason. Apple's anti-surveillance developments are popular for a reason. Movies about surveillance dystopias are popular for a reason. People like their autonomy while having a hard time imagining all the ways surveillance data can be abused. This narrative that surveillance subjects are fully informed willfully consenting participants is surveillance industry propaganda, and its ridiculousness becomes more apparent by the year.

No offense, but your argument is so off topic, conflates the presented argument, and is wildly speculative of what an end user might do that it seems as if your intention is to distract from the argument at hand.

“Anyone who cares” assumes a much higher level of technical competence and awareness than is actually present in the general population.

Most people have very little idea of the myriad ways they are being tracked (they know that it’s happening in general, but not the specifics), so they don’t go digging around in their phone settings to figure out how to make these changes.

The numbers on Apple’s “ask app not to track” usage demonstrate that the “people just don’t care about their privacy” crowd have serious blind spots.

If the issue were technical competence, you'd have a whole industry full of technically competent people who would be paid to take care of the issue for others. Even if people didn't realize that they needed the service, these enterprising individuals would produce marketing materials to reveal the pain point to them. That's how most technical services are sold. An electrician doesn't need me to understand the danger of a particular electrical issue, they only need to tell me the undesirable consequence of not fixing it - someone can be dumb as bricks but they'll still shell out money to fix it if they're told it could start an electrical fire.

The fact is this privacy protection industry does not exist because even after thoroughly explaining the issue to people, they generally still don't care. At the end of the day, it's not a real pain point - I suffer no measurable damage from corporations having my personal data, indeed I derive some small but non zero benefits. It might feel weird or even unethical to you, but that's just like your opinion man, and people with other value systems will not necessarily feel the same way. These people aren't dumb and blind, just apathetic.

Having seen two laptops side by side displaying different prices for the the same package holiday until the cookies were cleared on both I'm not so sure that there's no pain involved in ubiquitous tracking.

I think for the most part people just aren't aware of the consequences of corporate surveillance.

> The fact is this privacy protection industry does not exist

The largest consumer hardware company in existence (Apple) makes privacy a significant part of its marketing. I’m not sure where you’re getting this idea from.

You state that there is no real pain point, but I would posit that the pain point is simply non obvious. People are definitely weirded out when they have a conversation with someone about a product that they’d never heard of and then it suddenly shows up all over their phone. They simply don’t comprehend how much the bits of data they are shedding could lead to that kind of prediction behavior from Google/facebook et al. And to be fair, I doubt that the engineers behind that could explain the behavior with exacting precision.

At the end of the day there’s no good lever for the typical consumer. It ends up being framed as a all or nothing decision, and so they throw their hands up and say they have no interest in living as a hermit.

I've never once heard someone say they're buying an apple product for privacy purposes.

You're starting out with the assumption that prediction behavior is objectively a problem. Most people are well aware that they are shedding tons of information, but so what? When people get weirded out when their phone listens to them do they seek out someone to solve this problem for them, or do they shrug their shoulders and ignore it?

The world is full of complicated but nevertheless clearly problematic issues where the how is challenging to explain but the why isn't. With corporate surveillance the how is easy to explain but the why is not. There isn't some measurable harm inflicted, and most concerns are hypothetical in nature. Just because something feels vaguely weird doesn't mean it must be a problem, it just means you're not used to it.

It's like if you're arachnaphobic, you could conjecture that everyone who doesn't take precautions against spiders is simply ignorant of just how many spiders are around them, and indeed its true most people are not experts on spiders, but the fact is most people legitimately don't have a problem with spiders, and in the vast majority of cases they shouldn't as most spiders do no harm.

Your assertion was that there were no enterprising individuals that market privacy focused products.

I pointed out that Apple depends significant marketing, pr, and development resources towards positioning its products as a privacy preserving option. But because of your informal polling of people you know that all goes out the window?

For the record, the relative privacy of iOS over android was a significant consideration in my most recent buying decision. I say relative because it’s obviously not “perfect privacy”. But in any case you have heard now from at least one person that based their decision on that fact.

You’re quite clearly working backwards from a pre established conclusion. Do some, many or even the majority of people not care about privacy? I’d concede that point. But the narrative on HN that has last for years that regular people just don’t care at all is very much over confident.

Clearly there are also pure play privacy companies too. [1]

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/duckduckgo-android-app-tracking-...

You completely ignore the fact that the user has to understand they are being tracked.

I don't know of a single survey that demonstrates end users understand they are under constant surveillance. Can you point to one? Otherwise this argument seems like a complete distraction.

You completely ignore the fact that users can be told that they are being tracked. When they are told, do they say "this is a problem that I am willing to spend my resources on solving" or do they do nothing because they are apathetic?

You are the one claiming that people lack understanding but nevertheless care. Show me the survey indicating that claim to be true.

I am not sure that has anything to do with the argument. It's still surveillance.

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