Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtalantikite | Hacker News Reader

I live in a block-long grouping of condos in Brooklyn. Every so often the management company sends out exterminators and one day as I was talking to him he pointed to these environmental monitors installed on a lamppost on our block. He says “what’s with that, the government spying on us?” and I explained it’s just some environmental data collectors, but pointed to my neighbor’s Ring and mentioned “although that thing records me every time I enter or leave my condo”. He said “oh, I have one of those, it’s great”. He didn’t think there was anything wrong with the fact that Amazon was sharing the videos with law enforcement without consent. The cognitive dissonance was maddening but not at all surprising.

View on HN

The difference is that one of those things has a benefit. When there's a mysterious box that does some vague thing that you don't care about, it's safe to hate it. It's not helping you in any observable way, so opposing its existence is a safe, easy decision. But the Ring camera is providing him with a benefit, so evaluating whether to oppose it requires putting a cost on "spying on us" and weighing that against the personal benefits, which takes up a lot of mental load and consideration, so we ignore the vague costs against the concrete benefits.

People often care about these sorts of high level, idealistic concerns like "privacy" and "freedom" right until you offer them the smallest "concrete" benefit. Look at 23andme. Hey, can we take your blood, analyze your DNA, and send it to the police? No? What if we also told you what percentage Western European you are, would that convince you to pay us for the service?

"When there's a mysterious box that does some vague thing that you don't care about, it's safe to hate it. It's not helping you in any observable way, so opposing its existence is a safe, easy decision"

This sounds like the justification of stupidity. If you don't know what it does it ignoring may or may not be safe. If you can't observe a benefit to you (I assume you mean obvious and causual observation) doesn't mean it doesn't benefit you.

It's like you've codified ignorance to make it sound reasonable. This is the same level of thought my cat uses to interact with the world.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it sounds like the OP is not justifying such a view, but explaining how others tend to see things in general.

You are clearly not wrong.

It doesn't seem like because he's describing it directly and offering no criticism.

He also says " so we ignore the vague costs against the concrete benefits."

Which implies him and people like him or around him. Normally if someone wanted to indicate that they would say "some people think.." or "in their world/mind"

You're reading too much into the use of the royal "we" here.

> This sounds like the justification of stupidity.

Doesn't read that way at all to me. Reads like a very accurate depiction of reality.

I didn't claim otherwise

I didn't read it as justifying the stupidity, but explaining why people feel OK engaging in it. It came across as a good explanation of why so many people are so happily thoughtless.

“Thinking is hard work. That may be the reason so few engage in it.”—Henry Ford

Henry Ford is someone I would never consider a great thinker.

He explained himself well.

"Any man can learn anything he will, but no man can teach except to those who want to learn." - Henry Ford

It's open to interpretation but the poster said

" so we ignore the vague costs against the concrete benefits."

At the end of the first paragraph. He could mean "we" as in people though. He also didn't qualify the statement with something like "Some people.." "Many think..". Finally he offers no criticism of why it may be bad to think like this.

However, you're right and reading it now after the comments people made makes that seem more of a possibility than when I first read it.

Human minds navigate the world through heuristics; applying logic is an exhausting method that - for most people - must be reserved so it's available for high-leverage situations.

It's explainable by looking at polls for how Americans feel about major institutions. Gallup did one for various public and private institutions: https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-... and what they found is the only two major institutions that maintain a universal (across political affiliation and other demos) positive trust rating are small businesses and the military. Everybody else either varies a lot or just has universal low trust.

You'll note from this source that "big technology companies" score above all 3 branches of the federal government. Part of this is how partisan politics has become, so one party will have a majority of people expressing trust in an institution their party controls, the other hardly anybody, resulting in a fairly low score for the presidency and supreme court. Congress, it seems, is so universally despised it doesn't matter who controls it, it sits at single digit trust percentage.

In light of this it becomes understandable why somebody would be fine with big tech spying on them at the behest of the police (another institution with pretty high universal trust, though it does vary depending on political affiliation a bit it's considerably higher than any federal institutions), yet react with suspicion from something set up by bureaucrats from a federal agency.

When Democrats think of Congress they think Lauren Bobert/Mitch McConnell.

When Republicans think of Congress they think Nancy Pelosi / AOC.

That's how congress gets low ratings

And also how "my representative" consistently get scored highly on the same surveys.

I hope you let him know about Amazon's stellar privacy?

Or that they are in cahoots with "The Government" and will gladly share any and all data through back channels because AWS has very freaking lucrative contracts with them.

Or if you live in a two-party consent state that you don't consent. That should be enough. Someone that doesn't respect your consent doesn't respect you.

The recording as I understand it would still be illegal in a one-party consent state. Conversations that OP has in their house with their guests and/or children are being recorded by none of: OP, OP's guests, or OP's children. It seems to be very sketchy what they're doing.

I feel the same way whenever people freak out about smart speakers, laptop webcams and doorbells – but have had a smartphone (with microphone, camera, GPS, OTA updates and unrestricted up/down connectivity) on them 24x7 since 2008.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com