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Comment by matai_kolila | Hacker News Reader

I just don’t understand the obsession with privacy at all cost. What has anyone actually had happen to them as a result of their Reddit or YouTube browsing history?

This just seems like reverse voyeurism, and while that’s fine, it’s odd to assume anyone else shares that fetish with you.

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What happened to me? All the big social media sites send me to an information prison. It makes using the internet not fun anymore if you can't break out of your information bubble to get a different perspective! There's no "common knowledge" anymore and that development is fueled by people giving away their valuable data willy nilly. I just don't want that, I hate it actually and I think it's very dangerous tribalism and it's not has reached its peak yet, though more and more people get annoyed after noticing all these information prisons.

I really don’t think this take survives first contact with incognito mode…

Incognito mode is a lie. You will see different results based on your IP. At best it's random, or rather some fallback information that is still curated by algorithms. Also who uses incognito mode? A common sense of what happens in the world a common baseline and understanding won't just magically appear when you turn on icognito mode. That's an even larger claim imho.

It’s a matter of principle. If everybody were more concerned about their privacy there’d be less dark patterns from the these giant ad companies. Social media, Google, etc…

I think the point of privacy is, it isn't anyone else's business why someone would care about it.

It's a human right to have privacy. If you want to opt in to sharing everything about yourself to Big Tech and everyone else they sell data to then be my guest, but don't try to make it out to be a "fetish" to avoid this totally unnecessary data collection.

Privacy is a self-evident and basic human right, like freedom of expression. The principle of this is already acknowledged in law. For example, reading snail mail is very illegal, and nobody questions what harm would come from someone reading Grandmas "merry christmas" letter to you. It is only on the internet that violations of this right are turned a blind eye to, because of regulatory capture and government inertia. Regulators are slowly catching up (see GDPR) but in the meanwhile users are forced to take matters into their own hands.

The data being collected is valuable, evidenced by the fact that an entire industry exists for it. It is collected without the users' consent (beyond the sham of "by using this website you agree to our terms" - by the way, legally speaking individuals cannot agree to give up their rights). The users are not compensated for the valuable information that is harvested from them.

Lastly, many online service providers are cavalier with the security of this data. It is freely shared with hostile state actors (not necessarily western ones), predatory commercial third parties (spammers), and actual criminals. Due to lax security, criminals often gain access to this data and use it for identity theft, phishing and other fraud. People compile it in "social media background check" databases which exposes individuals, without their consent, to stalkers.

There's not enough space in a comment to go over every single instance of privacy violations leading to serious consequences for users, such as those you claim do not exist, so to anyone interested I would recommend doing a web search on privacy related topics.

So nothing; nothing actually happened, and so now we must invent moral outrage to sustain the hate cycle.

Aren’t you exhausted by all of this? Why continue to participate in the flywheel when you can otherwise simply reap the myriad benefits that come with a more connected society?

It just seems like some folks prefer constantly being upset…

For me, the turning point was when I understood that my fairly inoccuous data like browsing history or post likes can be used to infer information that I would not share publicly.

There are aspects of my life obvious from my Reddit/YouTube history that people I have heard people they say they think should be worthy of death [0]. Is it so unreasonable to be worried about that?

Why make it easier for this to happen? :

  >    First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
  >         Because I was not a socialist.

  >    Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
  >         Because I was not a trade unionist.

  >    Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
  >         Because I was not a Jew.

  >    Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

- Martin Niemöller

[0] Most of them wouldn't want to kill me personally. Just the nameless other that happens to match a lot about me.

Is reverse voyeurism when you don't want everybody to look at you naked? Because I'm pretty sure most people suffer from that. It's similar to reverse murder and reverse fraud, when you don't kill people, and you tell them the truth.

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