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Comment by barkingtoad | Hacker News Reader

I'm so tired of this.

If you're scared, get a dog.

Or just read the "Why Should You Care" section and really think about it. Is it so bad? Do they have your gramma's name and address and are they sending the Depends cops over to check if she's peed herself? No, they have a bunch of anonymous data that they never attach to you personally.

Everyone's trying to track YOU? NO, that's just some sort of weird narcissist paranoia on your behalf. Nobody is trying to track YOU. Everyone is trying to track EVERYONE. YOUR information is worthless on its own. NO marketer cares about YOU personally and YOUR data is not worth anything negotiable.

If you're scared, get a dog.

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What could possibly go wrong with individuals being tracked to this level? Don't be naive.

Explain, and while you do, remember that "slippery slope" is a logical fallacy.

While I am not nodata, I have a single acronym answer for you:

STASI

That's exactly what I'm talking about; we just magically went from "people are trying to target you with ads that are relevant to you" to "the secret police are going to make you disappear."

And that's the connection made when I specifically request an argument that's not slippery slope.

And I'm downvoted for specifically requesting a valid argument. Thank you, HN, or should I say, Reddit Lite.

I know I'm not meant to feed the trolls, but I do think it's important to imagine what life would have been like in Germany all those years ago if Facebook had existed.

> "the secret police are going to make you disappear."

Easily said, Tony, as a white male living in America. Some of us actually lived behind the Iron Curtain, and secret police and antagonistic governments aren't "magical" and hypothetical to us.

That's not correct. A slippery slope argument, given realistic risk and possibility, can be a valid argument. And that is exactly what all of the privacy concerns are about: risk.

I think we both know that breaches of sensitive and private data are a real danger and aren't some abstract, theoretical possibility that never happens. They happen all the time. Aggregation of personal data is dangerous by virtue of existence, without even touching the moral issue of whether it's ethical to try to spy into people's lives and habits for whatever reason.

Knowledge is power. And knowing almost everything about a person is one of the most dangerous weapons I can think of. Even more dangerous is that most people do not even realize how dangerous that is. They are either unaware of it, or worse, willfully ignorant.

My instinctual response to this debate is, if you having nothing to hide, why do you care. But you're right, there is a very fine line somewhere here in this quest for data collection, and as history shows again and again, the entities collecting it normally get too greedy, or slip, look the other way, etc, and the consumer ends up being taken advantage of, and having to learn once more, these entities can not be trusted.

If there were more of an "opt-in" mindset to doing such collecting, the situation would be a bit more balanced. I agree visiting a site and consuming its content while demanding the site gets nothing out of it is not balanced. But why can't we meet somewhere in the middle, with more transparency on what is being taken, and more permission asking for taking.

> My instinctual response to this debate is, if you having nothing to hide, why do you care.

My instinctual response to that is to ask if I can watch you the next time you go to the bathroom, or have sex.

Everyone tracking everyone IS the problem.

> Everyone is trying to track EVERYONE

I used to think this, but the Target article on NY Times changed my mind. I've started locking down all my computers.

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