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Comment by mwidell | Hacker News Reader

Nothing. Nothing bad ever happened to me due to lack of privacy protection. I am only happy if I get ads tailored to my interests. Even if Backblaze, where I store backups of all my data, would be hacked and leaked – nobody would probably care enough to dig through my personal data. People wildly overestimate how much other people care about them or their secrets.

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This is fascinating take and I love that this view is being represented on HN, specifically because it is not a minority opinion in the real world based on my interactions with my social circle.

<< People wildly overestimate how much other people care about them or their secrets.

People may not care about your secrets now. Right now you may be young. Right now you may have not pissed anyone off sufficiently to hire a private investigator to dig up stuff on you. Right now you may not be a party to a lawsuit.

All those things may be true right now, but things change. You have no idea how valuable right information can be at a given time. And here you are, volunteering it on a silver plate for anyone to pick as they please.

<<Nothing bad ever happened to me due to lack of privacy protection.

In other words, I think you are missing a key word here:"Yet". Nothing happened to you yet.

I have a few friends who are very privacy minded. They even refuse to use most of the big social media networks out of privacy concerns. But most people spend a larger and larger proportion of our social life online. So what ends upp happening is the privacy minded folks become more and more isolated from old friends.

I would argue you have so much more to win, than you have to lose, from letting go of that fear to share your life online.

You do have a point; I do not think I can reasonably dispute that a lot of people will spend more time online.

I am not sure if it is fear though. I personally feel I already spend way too much time online as it is. It was beyond awful as I was going through school, where I ended up doing work/school/fun by effectively just switching screen throughout the day. After years of that pattern I eventually severely cut back ( and even now I think I am overdoing it, but baby steps ).

I am ok with losing some people and some of the artificial online relationship that brings ( I accept that some online relationship may actually be stronger than generic RL ones ).

That's my strategy exactly, fall squarely in the masses. I also started treating all my online conversations as public, if all my online life went public, it might be awkward but it would be "ok".

And while I'm diametrically opposed to the "if you have nothing to hide" argument, I really don't have anything to hide, so individually it doesn't impact me.

Because the effects are subtle and not obvious (Like climate change). If revealing your address meant hooligans would come over to your house and throw bricks through your windows every time you did that, you'd pretty quickly stop doing it. But spending more money over time and social cooling aren't bricks through the window.

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