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Comment by adelevie | Hacker News Reader

This is a great example of how privacy is not optional, even in "opt-in" systems such as Instagram and FB. That Instagram does not require you to have a Facebook profile, and Facebook does not require you to list gender means very little in terms of your own privacy.

Merely choosing to withhold information about yourself does not insulate you from a breach of privacy. That others do disclose such information allows 3rd parties to make really good guesses and inferences about you.

There's a strange morality here: at what point is it unethical to voluntarily disclose data about oneself, if it could be used in a way to harm someone else's privacy? Short of drawing a moral boundary (it could very well be impossible), we might do well to at least acknowledge the cost to these methods, alongside their benefits.

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> There's a strange morality here: at what point is it unethical to voluntary disclose data about oneself

That's an interesting question. Especially since the data you disclose may triggers inappropriate inference of characteristics on someone else, maybe eventually causing some form of harm (anytime the demo fails to classify someone, we do cause some harm to him/her in a way). In the case where the misclassification is more harmful than the privacy disclosure, one is better off disclosing the information... weird equilibrium.

In other words: how am I affected by the fact that many of my Facebook friends like drug-related pages?

> There's a strange morality here: at what point is it unethical to voluntarily disclose data about oneself, if it could be used in a way to harm someone else's privacy?

At what point is it unethical to exhale, given that carbon dioxide is toxic to humans and is a greenhouse gas? At what point is it unethical to vote, given that you might influence an election in a way that is bad for society or some subset of society?

It's true that nearly every (and the "nearly" is just a hedge) action we take has some negative externality. I personally don't lose sleep over the ones that are virtually impossible to measure.

I don't get your point. If you post online do you really expect much privacy? Make your profile private and then the software won't be able to guess your gender. I tried three accounts, one was of a famous female model and apparently she's 0.516 probably male and 0.006 female, so I wouldn't be too worried just yet. Just don't post online if you want privacy, otherwise, learn from this.

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