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Comment by KiwiCoder | Hacker News Reader

We need more articles like this, we need a flood, until all the non-technical people in my life take their privacy more seriously than they do at present.

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Pointless. They do not care. Even in totalitarian states like the former DDR, most people didn't care. People only start caring when it's too late, when they themselves get affected.

Besides, the technical people don't care either. Many of us may care about our own privacy, but on the whole, we really don't care about what we do to others.

Most of us work for or own companies that directly or indirectly willfully violate people's privacy without thinking twice about the consequences. If only by adding yet another tracker to our apps.

We have no problems feeding our gullible users to the Google beast, yet we should be the ones warning others to take their privacy serious?

> People only start caring when it's too late, when they themselves get affected.

You might be right but I prefer to be less fatalistic. If an article (like this one) hits close enough to make someone think "it could have been me" then perhaps that is enough.

I don't understand your last sentence.

>I don't understand your last sentence.

I think he's saying that (some? most?) programmers are unknowingly being hypocrites if they add Google Analytics [1] javascript to their web pages while at the same time trying to educate people on being aware of privacy leaks. Adding tracking analytics not only provides the web authors the traffic insight, it also provides Google Inc with another vector to gather more data about users.

Even non-web programmers do a variation of feeding the google beast. The IT support staff have contempt for stupid user questions and think "can't they just google that?!?! That's what I do!". User: "how do I disable Adobe flash?". ITGeek: "let me google that for you"[2]

The xkcd comic[3] about it is also well-known.

When you send helpless users to google.com, Google Inc also adds users' searches to the profile they're accumulating. What do we expect IT advice to realistically be in response? Is it reasonable to advise people like this: "If you want to know how to disable flash, first install Tor client, and then a VPN client, sign up for a VPN provider, then start your web browser in private or incognito mode then use that as tunnel into google.com and then type in 'disable flash' as the keywords."

[1] https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

[2] http://lmgtfy.com/?q=disable+flash

[3] http://xkcd.com/627/

People have empathy. Non-tech people can understand the issues when they're presented like this. And an article like this makes me think seriously about the ethics of my job. Not that it carries real weight, but see: http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics

Maybe empathy alone will be enough to effect change?

> We have no problems feeding our gullible users to the Google beast, yet we should be the ones warning others to take their privacy serious?

I've found Piwik to be a great open-source (+ self-hosted) alternative - http://piwik.org/

I think we should let people not care without us aggressively trying to change their lifestyle. Are we so superior that we can decide what they should think? Or are they too dumb/uniformed to make their own choices? That's just as condescending. I'm pretty sure a lot of people are perfectly aware of all this and still choose not to care about privacy.

It is called advertising, making propaganda, lobbying. It works for a wide range of topics along any axes of the moral compass. For why it works, you probably hinted it in your post, but I don't see why it shouldn't be used for a good cause.

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