Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

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You're right that privacy is all about social norms and expectations. That's why I've never understood how people willingly sharing personal information is considered a privacy issue at all. If I show my friend a postcard sent to me by another friend, no one's privacy has been violated. If I trust a roommate (e.g. a significant other) to read my mail, there's no privacy issue there.

This applies to a huge portion of privacy concerns raised by the tech community. Someone sharing their photos, location, or thoughts willingly on Facebook does not constitute a privacy issue. Someone accepting a fairly clear Google privacy policy and thereby letting their algorithm read all their emails does not constitute a privacy issue.

The real privacy issues are ones where companies don't follow their own privacy policies, or companies' databases get compromised, or companies abruptly change default sharing settings to be more public (which, granted, I believe Facebook has done before).

AFAIK google has broken its own privacy policy, gmail's databases have been compromised and they did change default settings to be more public at least once.

This makes a strong contender of gmail for privacy issues.

That's why I've never understood how people willingly sharing personal information is considered a privacy issue at all. If I show my friend a postcard sent to me by another friend, no one's privacy has been violated.

Really? Because most people would consider that it HAS been violated.

Opting to share something with some person X is not the same as opting to have it shared by X to anyone else, except if you explicitly or implicitly permit him to.

If your gf sends you an intimate mail, I don't think she will not feel her privacy was violated if you show it to your pals.

> except if you explicitly or implicitly permit him to.

What was precisely my point.

> If your gf sends you an intimate mail, I don't think she will not feel her privacy was violated if you show it to your pals.

Depending on the message and your relationship, one might be able to argue that there is an explicit or implicit contract of confidentiality between partners.

I agree, but I think the same applies here--- people expect an implicit contract of confidentiality with utility providers. Most people would feel that wrongdoing took place if the phone company started recording random excerpts of your calls to build a profile on you, and in fact we feel that strongly about it that there are laws banning them from doing so. I would guess that many people don't realize that there aren't similar laws applied to whether Comcast can snoop on your web-browsing, or Google can snoop on your email, as opposed to acting in a classic phone-company-esque service role.

An interesting recent one that's cropped up is whether the electric company can use your electric usage patterns to build a profile on you, perhaps to sell to marketers or government agencies. It's only become feasible to build a detailed profile recently, with the monthly meter-reader slowly being replaced with electronic meters that report back usage much more often; now with appropriate machine learning the electric company can actually, in many cases, detect signatures of specific kinds of appliances, and build a profile of what you do when. European countries have started passing privacy laws around this data; its legal status is less clear in the US. I would guess most people don't realize this is possible, and if they did, would feel it was a violation of an implicit contract.

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