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Comment by viscanti | Hacker News Reader

Relevant advertising is relevant. Everything else is a waste of everyone's time (yours and the advertisers). Steps should be taken to safeguard privacy (you should never get a letter blackmailing you because of what you've done in the past), but if the focus is on making sure you only get relevant advertising and everything else is filtered before it gets to you, I consider that a win.

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One major concern that remains relevant is the prospect of abuse. You can't steal, misappropriate, or abuse what doesn't exist in the first place. You can't subpoena or execute a warrant to retrieve data that was never stored.

Privacy laws and rules provide some projection, but that only goes as far as they are enforced. Nonexistence of data cannot be subverted and is a much more robust protection against the data falling into the wrong hands.

The issue isn't necessarily who has the data now. It's who might get it later.

I think the concern over data coming back to bite you in a legal setting is more valid than others, but is still only relevant in very specific cases. Who else falls into the category of the "wrong hands" and what harm could they really do with a list of my interests, preferences and other information I make available on whatever social networking site I am on?

Short version: lulzsec and blackmail/public embarrassment.

Intruders count as the "wrong hands". A future buyer/board/CEO with fewer ethical scruples than the current managers of a given data set may count as the wrong hands, or allow it to fall into other wrong hands.

Say you're into poker and a bank buys your data. You're now tagged as a gambler and considered a liability, so you will have a harder time getting a loan. A future employer could buy it and decide they don't like some certain thing about you. Etc.

Maybe they will never sell your data, but maybe they will. There's unlimited potential for abuse from the corporate sector. What the FBI knows about me doesn't worry me much.

I agree. I think safeguards need to be put in place. I think it's OK for a computer algorithm to use historical information to provide relevant ads and filter out all the rest. Ideally, no one else would have any access to that data. It's more work, but I think it's worth the effort (there's way too much junk advertising out there).

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