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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

Privacy in good weather apps that are innovative can be tricky. Phones have enough sensors like barometers to be useful weather stations, and collecting that data could improve forecasts. But that also includes accurate location data, and making a useful forecast model from data collected on device is significantly more challenging when you account for privacy needs.

The “telling state of tech” may be that our hardware has outpaced our ability to socially reason about how useful weather data should be collected and shared, or not shared.

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> tricky

and then you go on to say "but I would just like to not give folks privacy because it's much more convenient for me not to".

That's not tricky, that's called being a shark. You are making the world a worse place by reasoning in this way and an even worse place by trying to spread it to other people.

Sure, but I'm fine with sharing my data for that purpose. I also have an app that registers any possible earthquakes and shares that data with a centralized server for analysis. I'm perfectly fine with that, as long as they don't sell my data to anyone who wants to market earthquake safety equipment or wants to track my location.

Transparency on the use of data is important to make decisions on this type of stuff. If a weather app requests access to my barometer to improve predictions, independent of my personal data, I would fully comply with that.

They may not sell your data, but it might be subpoenaed by a court. Or breached by a hacker. Or leaked by a coding error. Or by incorrect AWS permissions. Or an email campaign by a stupid PM.

"Privacy" has a nebulous definition, and I don't think many of us here have concerns about supplying anonymous data to help build useful systems. We need to re-frame the issue.

Individual and aggregated environmental sensor data could be used for so many good things. We can track storms, fires and floods, earthquakes, air and noise pollution, and save lives.

But it is abused by a greedy, unethical few, and so the systems can no longer be trusted.

Medical data, individual and aggregated, can be used to stop transmissible disease by detecting outbreaks, and improve our personal health through exercise monitoring and early issue diagnosis.

But it is abused by a greedy, unethical few, and so the systems can no longer be trusted.

Domestic data has the potential to manage energy, water use and air quality, keep homes safe from intruders, protect the elderly and babies.

But it is abused by a greedy, unethical few, and so the systems can no longer be trusted.

The pattern here looks like a tragedy of the commons. As engineers we can build systems with ostensible social utility which are then hijacked (sold, acquired, infiltrated) by "digital pirates" who turn them into systems of abuse (surveillance, manipulation and control). Each time the empty "assurances" are the same and the corruption predictable, inevitable and painful.

Perhaps it is time to stop thinking about "privacy" at the level of technical measures and permissions etc, and deal with corruption and abuse, which seems intrinsic to tech, at a different level. We have the mathematical/cryptological knowledge to build better systems. but it's the unethical few who benefit from stealing our data who don't want computer systems to be secure.

I think the key is to protect individual user from being harmed by misuse of the aggregated data, and provide transparency on how the data are being used.

Corruption always happens for a greedy, unethical few, but with the right technologies, we can make such abuse very costly. That hopefully, would restore trust from most users.

As a sibling commenter says, this seems legitimate use. They also probably don't need to track you for this. The data point that P pressure was detected at L location at T time should be enough. It doesn't need to know that when those parameters change, they're coming from the same user.

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