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Comment by Pesthuf | Hacker News Reader

We value your privacy.

That's why we share every little piece of data we get on you with our 816 partners and give them full permission to do with it whatever the hell they want, including resell it to their thousands of partners. For your convenience, we have installed state of the art surveillance technology in your home so we can watch you eat, sleep, take a shower as well as record every other event of interest. For your safety, our associates undertake regular visits to your registered address to open and thoroughly check all your mail before it reaches you and share every bit of info found it in with all of our partners.

We value your privacy.

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In my personal (empty) blog my privacy statement starts with: "Unlike all others I do not value your privacy." I will just paste the rest of the whole privacy statement here:

This website does not collect any personal information about visitors. My server is configured to not keep any logs, except for error logs, which do not include IP addresses.

This is the whole content of my privacy page. 25+ pages that other websites use, i managed to shorten to 2 lines.

How do you deal with bots, crawlers, and other unwelcome guests?

Well, it's public facing empty site. I am still trying to come up with a good first blog post.

I keep it because it's custom asp app and I play with it. I don't have visitors yet. Only bots :)

Value is used as a verb in the sense that they are deriving value from the activities you do in the privacy of your home.

Exactly this. It's a disingenuous white lie.

'We value [your lack of] privacy.'

When I looked at privacy policies, I rarely found the "We value your privacy" line in privacy policies that seem to treat your personal data with care.

"We value your privacy. Literally. Scarcity makes anything fetch a better price."

Or once could say, "Rest assured, as we gradually erode the sanctity of your privacy, the time will come when all interested parties will have sufficiently profiled you. Eventually, you will be distilled into a simple element within a behavioural prediction model. At that point, we will be anticipating your actions even before you are aware of them. Then you won't have to worry about being watched."

Perfect behavioral prediction wouldn't be enough. They want nothing less than perfect behavioral control (modulo a few 'free choices' they allow).

Lest we forget, this is (of course) the ultimate goal of all advertising.

Nothing is free. The internet always costs someone. If it's free, you're likely the product being sold.

Even when I pay, I still get monitored. Supposedly more so as I have identified myself as someone with resources. Are there any services which shut down analytics if I start paying?

Cars, TVs, streaming boxes, whatever. Physical devices for which I spend money, but the vendor still thinks they are entitled to know my every move.

It takes a bit more work to find something that is less, or not privacy invading.

Consumer products want to keep the consumer consuming.

One can start by learning yunohost or sandstorm and self-hosting.

Buy a car and put your own smarts in it.

Don't connect your TV to the internet and connect your own box to it.

You can find streaming box setups that are pretty locked down running a more secured version of android.

Unfortunately the "I've got nothing to hide" crowd made it easier for this kind of tracking.

It's time we start charging big for this negative externality of modern capitalism.

By the way, if our data is worth money then companies using our data without consent are stealing from us in the same sense that piracy or patent infringement is stealing. Big corporations cannot have it both ways.

> if our data is worth money then companies using our data without consent are stealing from us

By that reasoning Pepsi is stealing unsatisfied customers from Coca-Cola and should be put in jail. In other words, I don't think this is how capitalism works.

If there is valid consideration its not unjust enrichment. And the bar for valid consideration is a low one. Any This for that exchange will satisfy this requirement.

"In exchange for providing you this nearly worthless meme graphic someone else made, you give us panoptic access to your private online activities."

The whole point is that the reasoning is flawed. Big companies are applying their own flawed logic and ignoring the logical consequences of it.

See also: "Every vote for Sprite is just a vote for [Coke|Pepsi]"

It's not how any of it works, but it sounds clever to some, I guess.

"We value your privacy at $0.015 per bit of information"

Oh wow, free security and surveillance! Sign me up!!1

How else would giphy make money?

If its free and has no other visible way to make money you are the product.

In a way that doesn't violate privacy and security. If they can't, they shouldn't be in business the same way a cereal company that cuts their product with dirt or sawdust shouldn't be in business.

The death of bad businesses is a good thing.

The irony of people down voting the above and then reading this response on a VC run community platform is palpable.

What do you think everyone's been doing during the ignore unit price era?

HN is a maven trap, not a product. It helps YC to market, but is not the product itself.

By starting to charge money. Maybe not realistic right now because of the competition, but I'm sure it would look different if privacy abuse was illegal and everyone had to adapt.

I imagine media properties could pay Giphy to promote gifs of their properties. Probably wouldn't be that bad of an advertising strategy for a new release!

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