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Comment by 1970-01-01 | Hacker News Reader

1970-01-01

>The point here is to reduce harm and improve privacy by small increments at a pace that is realistically sustainable for an average person.

Here's the rub. I buy that privacy is not dead, however free privacy is very limiting. Total privacy remains a complicated pay to play game.

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Classic example with theZuck claiming privacy is dead, yet goes off and buys the houses around him so he can have privacy while creating one of the largest privacy invading morally bankrupt companies.

Though everything he says gets leaked to the media so the public got a little bit back at him.

Is it though? I don't think even rich individuals enjoy good privacy today. It's just that personal embarrassments cease to matter when you're rich and powerful.

There's a big difference between something you post intentionally that doesn't age well versus theZuckTracker5000(TM) that follows you every where you go on the internet without you explicitly consenting to it. There's a difference between showing people you went to suchandsuch location with suchandsuch friends doing suchandsuch that might only be legal in 28 states versus knowing exactly what you bought from where for how much and when. The graph you make with your posts is not the privacy being discussed. It is about the graph made by the invisible data paparazzi selling the most intimate and private bits of your life with whoever has the cash vs some paparazzi catching you in an unflattering situation from a mile away with a telephoto lens while you think you're having a private moment.

I know. What I'm saying is that I don't believe one can escape the network effect of the surveillance apparatus by being rich. What wealth and power can do, is make those who have it immune to the consequences.

One of the fascinating effects of the EU's GDPR laws passing is that you can see european data get more expensive for data brokers to sell (I don't have sources for this, just something I read somewhere). Ostensibly, you now have a way to compete with different legislatures as to who is doing the best job of protecting their constituents' privacy-just see who's data is most expensive to aggregate/resell.

It's hard to discover how much money is being made off selling user data, and I think this only leads to smaller companies trading in user data to disappear, while the larger players can do more with your data behind the scenes. The larger companies having fewer competitors allows them to spend more of their time on finding ways that are "legal" to track users, ones which are technically in compliance with existing laws. Maybe my way of thinking about the situation is different than yours, and I could also be completely wrong. I am just much more pessimistic when it comes to how much value is in user data (especially as AI develops more), to think that larger players won't do anything they can to collect user data by finding loopholes in the law, or allowing themselves to be taken to court because the laws aren't defined well enough.

Larger companies has always been able to break the law and get away with it. That is unlikely to change. However laws do have an effect on such companies, because their protection is only as strong as people are willing to give them exceptions. When they break the law too much and looses popular support, the result in targeted laws that either break the large companies into smaller chunks or impose additional laws that just target the big companies (sometimes by name).

I agree with you, but I think that having fewer smaller players makes it easier for bigger ones to get away with far too much. If smaller players existed, they could fight to keep the amount of data extracted smaller so they were able to continue existing. Of course, this is a dream, but worth thinking about (at least in my head as a though experiment on keeping privacy more constrained so bigger companies didn't have as much to work with).

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