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Comment by youngerdryas | Hacker News Reader

>I think the most immediate step going forward that can be done on the side of the private sector is to stop collecting, as much as possible, extensive profiles on people, especially profiles that are, or easily can be, tied to their real identity.

So Google and Facebook should commit Seppuku?

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Google has been making large profits since long before Google+ even existed. There's probably some incremental value in having real-name profiles tied to data, but there's very large incremental harm as well, such that adding such functionality is net-negative for society. A large number of Googlers have made a similar argument, which is why the real-name policy was so controversial; the argument was already pretty strong before the NSA revelations, and is only stronger now.

Facebook is a trickier case. Their business model may simply be incompatible with a non-surveillance society.

I think the original idea of elimination of the collection of all private or personal information by all companies is a bit extreme.

From what we have learned, these programs are quite broad involving everyone from banking institutions to ISPs and telecoms.

Should banks do their business without knowing anything a about you, same for credit reporting agencies?

Maybe, but that would be quite a shift from the way things are done today.

Also, I thought it was common knowledge that some type of digital surveillance has been going on for some time.

My recollection is that the FBI was able to gain access to ISPs and use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software) to track emails.

If an individual is concerned with privacy they should probably take matters into their own hands and use encryption, cash, bitcoin and other tools to protect their identity and leave as little private information online as possible.

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