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Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

Here, let's go the other way (maybe they even go together!):

Let's imagine a world where you sign up for discounts on certain goods in exchange for allowing your Glass to randomly take pictures throughout the day. This data is mined and tagged and sorted, until one day the .gov or .mil or some hacker decides to pull it and use it for nefarious purposes.

The fact is that the nerd fantasy of getting a HUD (to track what, exactly? Ammo? Health? Some numbers in a database you've been trained to equate with self-worth?) is not worth the societal cost of losing privacy.

"But we've already got smartphones with cameras!" doesn't work--the camera is there, and likely just a change of app policy away from being always on.

This is such a shortsighted idea.

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What a ridiculous slippery-slope assertion. The same argument could be said for the telephone - "Inevitably some company will offer discounts in exchange for random recordings of your phone calls. Everyone will sign up for that and then a hacker will take advantage of it."

There are at least two reasons stuff like that doesn't occur: 1) The cost of recording, storing, parsing, and analyzing all that data far outweighs any sort of tangential benefit a company may get from such a policy. That's on top of the massive PR risk. 2) The number of people that might sign up for privacy invasion in the interest of a 2 for 1 Big Mac would be so insignificant as to not constitute any sort of grand 'societal loss of privacy'.

The telephone example is near exactly Google Voice, right? Massive voice database for the cost of some subsidized VoIP and storage?

"...cost of recording, storing, parsing, and analyzing all that data..."

You do realize that this is exactly the Google and Facebook business model, right? Targeted advertising using user-generated content?

"The number of people that might sign up for privacy invasion in the interest of a 2 for 1 Big Mac would be so insignificant"

Over a billion people have signed up for Facebook, giving up their own social graph data and (as we've seen recently) address books, and that's just for a free shitty profile page whose design changes on a whim. Add a burger to that, and you've got a deal.

There's no slippery-slope here--at this point, the dataset is large and obvious enough that if you aren't blinded by the magical nerd future you'll see very reasonable concerns over what might happen.

Do you have any evidence that Google Voice records phone calls without a user's explicit permission? I was never referring to voicemails (which are rarely used these days anyway).

I also don't see how you can make the argument that passive recording of everyone around you is the same as Facebook only receiving data that a user proactively sends it (ie. status updates, photo uploads, etc.).

Finally, even if we were to accept your slippery-slope arguments as true, why not go further down the slope and claim that the internet shouldn't exist either because massive data sets about your lives are already being mined and are at risk of nefarious use?

Always, always with the absurd "hurr durr slippery slope what about this nonsensical extreme" stuff. If you cannot fathom the difference between the Internet as a loose federation of servers and services on an open protocol and network, and the sharecropping and fencing-in of modern walled gardens, I have nothing to say to you. If you can't figure out how the latter position is more easily abused than the former, I can't help you.

As for the voice stuff--look, given that much data, why wouldn't you mine it to improve things like transcription and whatnot?

(If a Googlebro wants to correct me on this, by all means go ahead.)

It's surprising you don't see the contradiction in saying that the open network of the internet is vastly different than our modern walled gardens, but then saying that our open real-world is comparable to the same walled gardens.

Also, I don't give much credibility to arguments that are based off an assertion like "I have no evidence, but...well, why wouldn't you?"

His argument seems to be that users will willingly give up meaningful amounts of privacy and personal data in exchange for minor conveniences and discounts because they don't understand the value or deeper ramifications of doing so.

It seems bizarre that you would try to dismiss this.

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