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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

They may be the top stories, but they have never appeared on any list of voters' top concerns. It's always crime, jobs, the economy, inflation, and health care.

People can say whatever they want to journalists, but they say different things to the politicians. Standing up for privacy does not get you elected and so we will continue to get anti-privacy laws and Attorneys General who won't enforce what we do have.

The best you can hope for is a judge deciding how they want the Constitution to read, and that's far from the slam dunk you'd expect.

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> crime, jobs, the economy, inflation, and health care

These are the post-facto rationalizations voters cite to explain or defend their vote. But the actual decision is made much earlier than voting time, and it’s one driven primarily by emotion and social influence. The “issues” are a convenient alignment mechanism but not the primary motivator.

This should be obvious by the fact voters must choose between two viable candidates – the choice has been made for them, long before they get the luxury of sorting through which issues are most important to their vote.

Then how did we get the laws we have now? How did we get the constitution and the amendments?

By near definition, the lawmaking process mostly works on account of interested parties. There aren't a lot of issues that can get enough support merely by sheer mainstream pushback. That's why organizations spend time spreading awareness and lobbying (as well as coporate billionaire companies).

It'd be much nicer if privacy was one of those mainstream topics. But that's not the case thus far. It's mostly propped into legislature by smaller organizations.

Also the groups that profit of your lack of privacy will heavily lobby/advertise against it using every fear based tactic they can. "Terrorists, child molesters, communists, Trans Mexican aliens from Mars are going to take over unless you give up your privacy!"

A bunch of rich white slave-owners wrote the rules over the space of a few months in Philadelphia.

One of the rules is that it's damn near impossible to amend the rules. It hasn't been done in a half century. (Setting aside one oddball originally written by those rich white guys but left in a drawer by accident.)

I wonder if this will shift over the next decade as Millenials start to become the voting bloc to appeal to, a generation that grew up with the internet (or at worst, started picking up the internet late in college/early in the workforce)?

Among other factors, boomers grew up in a time where it wasn't unusual to announce your home address during a televised interview. Their ideas of privacy and locality is so fundamentally different from a generation that was the test bed for factors like cyberbullying, doxxing, mass trolling/harassment for users all around the world.

And you know, spending your 30's/40's seeing blatant government overreach to harrass minorities and political opponents will help. Doubly so for Gen Z seeing this in their early adult years.

No, probably not. For as many Z's that care about privacy there seems to be 4 more that post their lives online.

So, 20%? Those are actually prerty good odds for a national topic.

But yeah, nothing is certain about this stuff per se.. Maybe all this blatant corruption wakes some of the not old blocs up. Maybe it's swept under the rug yet again if comfort and relief returns.

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