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Comment by pothibo | Hacker News Reader

I think nobody values privacy. People don't want to pay for an e-mail account. People don't want to pay for a social network. People don't want to pay to read the news online.

I believe that privacy and free (as free beer) is an utopia.

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It is not about the values. people do value privacy, but there is asymmetrical information between service providers and customers. As such, the price goes down to zero and the product quality reflects it.

Economist George Akerlof pointed this out in his 1970 paper "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.". The way society fixed it with cars, was to introduce Lemon laws. If they hadn't introduced those laws, people would likely sit here and argue that nobody values what material the car chassis is made of, or if gas fumes leaked into the compartment. Nobody would value safety people would say, as everyone would rather buy the cheap car over the expensive (and more secure) ones.

Of course people will choose "free" over "costs something", if all else is equal. You are not adding much to the debate by pointing that out.

Far more interesting to note that paid services (yes, people used to pay for e-mail) have largely been elbowed out by services that look as though they are free, but actually extract their payments by guile and deceit. Now that the general public is starting to appreciate the value of their personal data, perhaps we'll see a rebalancing of the market.

I believe you missed my point. Most people outside the tech world have no idea who Edward Snowden is and what exactly happened with the NSA scandal.

Computers are just a black box to them with something magical happening underneath (I'm not kidding here). If they don't understand what they are using, how can they understand the tradeoff between something free vs something they pay for?

Are you sure about your first statement? Everyone in my family knows about Snowden. And not because I told them. None of them are even remotely close to the tech world. I'm from Sweden.

Ah yes, Sweden. A place where there is no technology. At all.

The idea that only technology nerds are aware of the NSA scandal is plainly untrue. Right now many members of Congress are upset, and even the President himself has had to provide a response on the issue. This has become front page news that any ordinary person can see as he walks past the newspaper stand.

> I believe you missed my point. Most people outside the tech world have no idea who Edward Snowden is...

So your point is basically that you think "most people" are stupid? Good luck with that.

You said stupid. I say they don't understan because they don't care. Not everyone likes computer, you know.

If you think the Edward Snowden revelations are a "computer" issue, then you've not been paying attention.

I think everybody values privacy, from the youngest to the oldest users.

The issue is that of education--many people haven't made the connection that to get a lot of the neat features they like (geolocation, frictionless sharing, etc.) they need to allow some fairly invasive personal data mining. They don't understand that sharing certain things and using certain apps also causes the data of other people to be exposed.

I think (hope) that if people new more about this, then we'd see the social mores change a bit. Unfortunately, that sort of education and public service announcement takes money, and none of the players in the Valley or elsewhere want to do it, because it would negatively impact their viral coefficients and user engagement.

I value privacy, and I pay for email. I pay for it in part so that it's not gmail and ad-focused. I probably would pay for a social network (if I used social networks).

You got me at news, I like free news. The problem with news is that my news doesn't come from a single source, so I'd feel a little foolish paying for the New York Times (which I read often, and subscribe to their free headline service), since there's so much other good news sources in addition. NYT doesn't seem special enough to pay for, when there are legal ways to read it free and when the same news is often reported elsewhere, and usually reported just as well.

News is tough.

This is basically a rephrasing of the meme "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product".

That meme is grossly outdated.

It's entirely possible (and happens) that you can be both paying for a product and be the product that is sold on (by having your data aggregated, analysed, fed into other systems etc).

Isn't this part of what Big Data actually means? It's essentially a way for a company to get paid at both ends (which I don't have a problem with), but it can create competing incentives between users and companies (which I do have a problem with).

This debate is far more complex than just 'free vs paid'.

Value does not have to be monetary. In the example of an e-mail account, valuing privacy might be choosing a specific host because it has some better ToS or selecting a specific client because it supports PGP well.

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