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Comment by mitthrowaway2 | Hacker News Reader

No, I care about that as much or more.

You're an outlier. Ask ten people at your local bus stop if this is important to them, and tell me how many start laughing at you :)

I specifically mentioned people on this website. Based on comments I regularly come across on this website, I don't think the person you're responding to is an outlier. I would hope we can stay on topic.

You missed the point.

People on this website are too small a fraction of society to ever move the needle. My point is that it doesn't matter what people on this website want with respect to privacy, in our capitalist democratic society it will never happen unless most people want it.

The reality right now is that most people don't want it.

If that was your point, I suggest you post more clearly in the future, because your post did not suggest this.

If I went up to random people and went like, "Do you approve of companies tracking what you buy, eat, do, where you go, and every other aspect of your life?" I promise you I would get a majority of "No"s

The question I'm asking is "would you pay more money if the service promised not to sell your data". That's a hard no for most people.

If you frame it as a negative thing with no downsides for agreeing with you, of course people will agree. But that's not the reality.

Not because people don't value their personal data but because they, rightfully, value those promises as worth approximately nothing.

It's an interesting theory, for sure. Continuing down the rabbit hole... I guess you could ask about "company promises" versus "regulatory prohibition". But then one might argue that similarly rests on the population's perception of the efficacy of government regulation, which is certainly also somewhat low...

What's the solution then?

People will also say they will pay more for a ephemeral good like privacy or patriotism, so I think you'd be surprised if you ask them your question. Where you're right is will they actually do it, and even if they will how much?

I'd guess that if you ask people about a broad right to privacy, they will mostly express support for it. You could ask:

    "Would you pay extra for a guarantee your personal data is kept private?"

    "Would you pay extra for a guarantee your data isn't sold for marketing purposes?"

...and I would guess the first would have a higher "yes" rate, although still low. But I also expect a chunk of people would ask you to define "private" before answering the first question...

One might argue "private" implies more than can truly be promised, for example no US company can promise to ignore subpoenas and actually follow through.

I'd say it mirrors for patriotism: "do you support $OUR_COUNTRY" will get more "yes" responses than almost any more specific question about support for anything tangible. Precisely because it's sort of meaningless and unobjectionable... (well except in the US, where I'm sure it's correlated with whether or not one's favored party is in power)

It's because acompany promise is useless without actual enforced regulation which is harsh enough to actually add trust in such a contractual agreement being honoured.

This is how we have a free-market to begin with. You need enforcement and structures in place so people will actually trust any of this crap. Instead, we have the nutjob early 90's cyber libertarians thinking this will all be magically fixed with just magical freedom and the invisible hand fixing everything.

Yeah, I don't disagree, another comment touched on the distrust part. But would people trust government privacy regulation more?

The claim you made was that people don't care about their behavior being monetized.

Don't care enough to sacrifice anything tangible to avoid it, yes. I would think it's obvious the question as you framed it biases responses to the point they're meaningless...

'People object to advertising because it is annoying and distracting. If the ads disappear, they got what they paid for. It's not about avoiding their "behavior being monitized", most people don't care about that at all.'

That's your quote as I read it in case some editing happens. There's no caveat in your original post that you are claiming now. You've moved the goal posts. As you originally stated, I agree with all of the follow up comments to it that you are now trying to expand on your original comment. Maybe that's what you always meant but just left out of the original. It happens. But now you're being obstinate about it in a way that doesn't look good.

No, you're just nitpicking the semantics and missing the forest for the trees. Everyone except you seems to understand that that was the beginning of a discussion, not an opening statement in a fucking court.

yeah, it's me with the problem, that's why i'm at least the 3rd person to take issue

But are you most people?

I'd wager that just by the virtue of being commenters on HN, we're already outliers.

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