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Comment by maplethorpe | Hacker News Reader

> We didn't have the same concept of OPSEC back in the early 2000's (lol Foursquare wtf were we thinking) and the idea of sitting down at the end of the day and pouring everything that happened into a journal entry was completely normal.

I was there, and we weren't all like this. I can remember being offended when a friend checked me into a location with foursquare, broadcasting my location out to the world. I felt similarly offended when I was "tagged" in photographs (and still am to this day).

This idea that we were all collectively oblivious and only recently made our way out of the fog really bothers me. Why did the majority of my generation never care about their own privacy?

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20+ years isn't exactly "recently" in internet time.

And while early 2000s might be pushing it, in the 1990s, it was most certainly normal for people to put their home phone numbers in Usenet signatures. The internet was initially just this small subculture thing for nerds, generally not on the radar of anyone not wishing you well. Your employer wasn't there. Your parents weren't there. Your stalker wasn't there. Your insurer and your bank and your local PD weren't there.

And I hate to say this, but the privacy dystopia we now live in is largely of our own doing. We had a bunch of really naive ideas about how information wants to be free. It made for a couple of wonderful years, but then allowed bad actors to abuse every single bit of it. And the bad actors weren't exactly external: the companies were founded and staffed by techies who now lament the status quo.

yeah by 2000ish I really didn't see egregious opsec violations at all as a rule. the world described by the linked article doesn't really match my experiences.

if you were tech-savvy enough to blog, you were tech-savvy enough to have some clue about that stuff.

also, people weren't like, "liveblogging." they didn't have personal internet devices in their pockets. typical personal noncommercial blogging was people talking about stuff they did days or weeks ago. and even early platforms like Livejournal had visibility filters on posts; people kept the personal stuff friends-only

that was just my personal experience. i guess the author had a different one

I think it is more a matter of someone confusing own bubbule with how everyone acts.

Overwhelming majority of people did not had journal and it was not any more normal to wrote every day then it is now.

It is true that people were not able predict true extend of online harassment. But again, plenty people now are completely oblivious to what mobs do.

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