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Comment by corndoge | Hacker News Reader

The funny thing is that now we have people freaking out about Flock. These same people didn't care about Snowden files at the time. In the same vein there are many ALPR companies besides Flock but none of them are getting any heat.

Too much is happening for anyone to keep up with it all.

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Who are these people that you talk about? Everyone I know who dislike modern survailance cared about the Snowden files. Of course they also cared about echelon before this and so on. I absolutely think you're on point with the last sentence thouhg.

The recent revelation that LG tv's were recording everything going on around them at all times and sending it to the cloud... Should've frankly outlawed LG tvs here in Europe, and maybe we will see some sort of legislation down the line. Who knows though, because the different privacy factions within the EU certainly war on what mass survailance to allow.

> Who are these people that you talk about?

Do you want the commenter to post list of people? Even if they do, you will outright dismiss it saying too few. Your comment is ridiculous. People had all the chance to stop trusting corporations and demanding changes to digital sites. Now instead you got circus full of so called “influencers” who pimp their life to advertisers and god knows who, US court demanding intrusive age verification embedded inside OS, govt demanding screening social life and your personal phones just to enter within a border. There was a time for action before it was too late, ie, during snowden revelations, people didn’t do fuckall. And you are surprised now LG is spying on you!

> Do you want the commenter to post list of people?

If you're not providing any form of evidence for your argument, then it's not really valid. Similarily, who are these influencers you refer to, and where on earth did I say that I was surprised LG is spying on me?

You seem very angry, but you blame everyone else. What have you done to combat this? I've personally actively worked in the FOSS community to prevent anti-privacy laws here in Europe. I'd say that Snowden wasn't the wake-up call we hoped because nothing seems to have consequences. Epstein files caused a few arrests in Europe, so did the Panama papers, but really, the elite is largely untouched by consequences.

Here in the US, "Flock bad" has entered the Algorithm which dictates what people see and care about. People otherwise uninvolved in technology, whose eyes would glaze over in a conversation about mass surveillance, they will light up if you say Flock. It's just in the zeitgeist. My comment was more meta commentary about how recommender algorithms and not people's personal thoughts / opinions are deciding which causes get attention.

The rather interesting and revealing mistake YC and Flock made was to be so stupidly conspicuous. It’s a cascade of failure. You know why the secret police, “spies”, and agents of tyrants tend to keep as clandestine as possible; they’re all evil, vile, and are up to subversive infiltration, sabotage, control, abuse, manipulation, degradation, and harm in general. They don’t give themselves a catchy startup name adjacent to the abuse they are trying to achieve, treating humans like cattle to manage in a corral, they don’t try to stand out with a uniformly, evil-colored pole right where everyone sees it stand proudly, they don’t have a CEO named Langley.

It would all be comical if it weren’t clear signs of a decaying society that has betrayed the American Revolution, which is not actually a legitimate USA at all, and hasn’t been anything more than a facade for well over 100 years, merely keeping the banners and slogans to keep the populace on-board, cheering their own subjugation and management. “Why did they not just rebel and leave the capital-plantation since they outnumbered the ruling class capital-Plantation masters?”, someone in the future will ask.

People don't care about things unless/until they become part of the Omnicause.

What's that?

This is the term for all vaguely leftwing causes to get conflated, such that trying to talk about any one of them usually ends up in a rabbit warren of sub-discussions about everything else.

This caricature is not entirely undeserved. Plenty of people can shoehorn Palestine into every single discussion.

I still don't understand what the comment means.

The internet is indeed very good at squandering young people’s passion and energy, directing them towards endless debates about the right sub‑sub‑ideology in blogs and subreddits with 1,000 subscribers, rather than towards actually changing people’s lives.

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