Comment by dbspin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbspin | Hacker News Reader

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I find your comment bewildering. It seems so focused on the perceived effect of an issue that it leaves no room for the actual material effect of the issue.

Frankly I couldn't give two hoots about the impact on sales of future robotic devices of the 'PR problem' of their perceived privacy intrusions. By contrast the actual danger of their real material privacy intrusions is deeply concerning. Similar to Ring - or more pertinently Flock cameras.

The media discourse is interesting, but only sociologically. The fact that these devices are actually spying is significantly more pertinent.

> PR is the problem you have to overcome for people to let smart devices into their homes too.

Why on earth should real material concerns be 'overcome'? These concerns focus on real and deeply serious issues. They concern child safety, marital privacy and a host of other real issues.

> PR is the reason they even had anything to listen to.

This is factually incorrect. You're confusing the shadows in the cave for reality.

Just about sums up the attitude.

It’s not that the robots are surveilling and that would be morally wrong… it’s that people are upset by it and that impacts the bottom line.

“I’m sorry that you chose to feel that way”

Nowhere did I ever say anything is not a real issue or that people don't have reasons to be upset or any of the things you people seem to be putting in my mouth. By PR problem I literally mean that people have to discover and spread that your product is genuinely not a violation of privacy, which of course requires that your product genuinely not be a violation of privacy. Nowhere did I ever say that the problem is that people have a problem with it. The problem is that people don't know you don't do it until they know. For business that is a struggle because you can't necessarily control what people know like that. All you can do is make the same claims everybody else makes and hope that someone will independently investigate and discover that yours are claims that actually hold up.

> Frankly I couldn't give two hoots about the impact on sales of future robotic devices of the 'PR problem' of their perceived privacy intrusions. By contrast the actual danger of their real material privacy intrusions is deeply concerning. Similar to Ring - or more pertinently Flock cameras.

What I'm saying is that PR influences how the masses perceive your product and therefore whether it gets mass adoption or mass avoidance. Yes, the so-called "material effect" (whether privacy is actually undermined by the product) results in PR one way or the other, but most people don't do the digging to figure out exactly what the material is, they rely on what has reached the public eye.

> Why on earth should real material concerns be 'overcome'? These concerns focus on real and deeply serious issues. They concern child safety, marital privacy and a host of other real issues.

You overcome it by being able to prove you don't invade privacy. That's overcoming the preconceived notion that products in your category are not to be trusted in general.

I never, ever said or meant that the goal is to still undermine privacy but just not have people find out or have a problem with it. (Even though most companies in practice have this goal)

Zero VC funded companies in this space will not eventually invade privacy if they're able to. The only way to avoid that is open source and self-hosted - actually owning the equipment AND fully controlling the open software stack. Anything else will eventually be exploited for spying by a VC funded company. Rug pulls always happen - "Don't be evil" always turns into "Be nearly maximally evil" for financial reasons in corporations configured to be exploitable in this way by their shareholders...

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