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Comment by sukuriant | Hacker News Reader

Citation needed on the 20% of the population of the US that doesn't use the internet. Is there even 20% of the US population outside of 100 miles from the shore?

Also, you can't use a cellphone without them knowing who you are with high certainty. It only takes 3 points of location data to identify a person the vast majority of the time[1]. Using a cell phone that you paid for with cash is insufficient.

[1] http://www.livescience.com/28353-anonymous-phone-data-not-an...

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Rough estimate from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territo... suggests that about 2/3 of americans live in a state bordering the ocean, so about 100 million americans further away from the shore.

What that has to do with anything, god only knows, unless you meant something like '100 miles away from the border', and even then I'm at a loss.

Go visit a flyover state sometime. Most of the country's very different than SV/the northeast corridor/other modern urbanized area, and I wouldn't live there if you paid me.

GP is likely talking about the "Constitution Free Zone", or the area within 100 miles of a border [1].

[1]: https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights-constitution-free-zone...

I was going on the assumption that most people in population centers use or have used the internet; and that the number of people that were not in population centers was less than 20%; and I mental-gymnastics'd myself to thinking that those population centers tend to be on the shore, so I said it that way.

Not necessarily right, but that's how I go there.

"most people in population centers use or have used the internet" 80% is "most" by lots of definitions.

You're right; but I figured 95-99% in population centers and much more than 50% everywhere else, which ends up being more like at least 86% of the people in the United States used the internet in the last year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...

So actually 19%, yes.

... wow. I sincerely didn't expect that number to be accurate at all. Okay then!

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