> What's your most convincing argument for why an average person should care more?
Laymen Argument 1:
Mark Zuckerburg who has majority control of the largest source of private data in the world bought the two plots of land next to him for privacy reasons.
Laymen Argument 2:
Forward me all of your emails if privacy isn't an issue. crickets
The average person doesn't care about these because it doesn't affect them right now, but it's a "boil the frog" situation...you won't know you're getting boiled to death until it's too late.
> Mark Zuckerburg who has majority control of the largest source of private data in the world bought the two plots of land next to him for privacy reasons.
President of USA, travels with a ~100 men security cover all the time, does not mean USA is unsafe to move around and you should stay in home with a gun in hand.
To be fair US president is said to be single most powerful person in the world.
I don’t have any data to back it up but I could see them being no. 1 assassination target globally.
OTOH few years back I was walking and passing near former president of my small European country. Since he is rather charismatic I asked if I can shake his hand and get a photo. He agreed and we did so, however I learned few minutes later from a friend lagging behind, that couple random bystanders twitched and totally focused on our interaction. Obviously personal security. So it’s not like security isn’t there, we might just not see it.
I’m not sure about that counter-argument. POTUS is currently the most powerful position in the world, but between 1850 and 1915 (approximate dates), I think the British and possibly French empires were more powerful.
In this time period, three American presidents were assassinated. The UK lost one MP, who was not the PM, and apparently the killers only targeted him because he happened to be walking with their main target at the time. None of the UK royals were assassinated in that period.
I don't know for other heads of state, but the French president has a (small) service dedicated to his protection, the Groupe de sécurité de la présidence de la République (Security Group of the President of the Republic), whose name is a little more explicit than Secret Service.
Fun story: at the time of its creation, in 1983, under president Mitterand, one (unofficial) mission was the protection of the illegitimate daughter of the president.
Sure, but what makes the analogy not hold? Just as there are more parties interested in harming a president, there are more parties interested in spying on Zuckerberg than you or I.
> Forward me all of your emails if privacy isn't an issue.
What do I get in return? Privacy is a trade off, and that's how it's sold. "We need more CCTV cameras to stop crime". Do you want more crime or more privacy? Depends on how bad the crime is, I guess. "We need to record your likes to show you more stuff you like". Is FB worth it? It is to many, apparently.
It's highly interesting that nobody would even dream of saying something like "apparently, most people on Earth think transsexuals are evil", or "do global warming and the increasing extinctions of species matter? not according to most, apparently". Why do people in "tech" outsource their judgement on this topic to people who aren't even in the room, a mythical "average person", every single time the issue comes up?
What was the breaking point for, say, to start fighting for and making headway when it came to sexual self-determination? Once more than half of the people on the planet were for it? Or did Rosa Parks decide "now is the time, most people in the US support the end of segregation, now that it's only a formality, I won't change seats?". No, that's not how it works. You figure out what you consider to be right, and then you fight for it. You don't know the outcome, you know what you know to be right, or wrong. You get sick of something, and then you refuse to participate in it, because you'd rather die. And historically, it sometimes takes a small amount of dedicated people to change things for the better.
I haven't seen a person who is really strong-willed about not caring about their own privacy. It's not like most people who "don't care about privacy" are fighting against it, they're sleepwalking. They'll just as happily sleepwalk into another direction, so that they don't care can't be an excuse, ever. Right now, it's easier, and less socially painful, to not care about privacy. That can be changed.
If people don't have experience with totalitarianism, and don't learn about it, and don't smell it in the wind today, then of course they will balk at any inconvenience to prevent it. But if it happens again on sufficient scale, it'll be a point of no return. There will be no more humanity; Earth will be an eternal torture chamber at worst, just empty of human agency at best, at any rate a boot stamping on a human face, forever. You would just need a way to give someone a really lucid dream, getting tortured for a few weeks in a dictatorship. Upon waking up, they will realize they need a few tools, privacy and human rights that apply to all being among them. People who don't have the empathy and imagination to have completed such thought experiments in their youth don't have any blessing to give, so I wouldn't even worry about ways to retrieve it from them.
> Why do people in "tech" outsource their judgement on this topic to people who aren't even in the room, a mythical "average person", every single time the issue comes up?
The same reason they use the "average person" as a straw man in arguments about OS usability and whatnot: deep down they believe that they are better than other people because they know tech stuff. People can sense this too, it's one of the reasons tech people, as a group, aren't well liked.
> Why do people in "tech" outsource their judgement on this topic to people who aren't even in the room
I'm not outsourcing my judgement, I don't use Facebook. But many people do, so they seem to view it as a net benefit, unless Facebook has literally started to strap people to their chairs and force them onto the app. You can argue that they are wrong and shouldn't value "connecting with friends and seeing memes" over privacy, but that's a different discussion.
You're conflating rights issues with a choice. You can choose to use Facebook just as you can choose to drink coffee, eat lots of sugar or live a sedentary life style. Sure, let's talk about free will, but that's completely unlike sexual self-determination, slavery, segregation etc.
> You figure out what you consider to be right, and then you fight for it.
No, I don't. I figure it's right to not drink alcohol, but I don't fight so that nobody may drink alcohol. I just don't drink it, but it's fine if you do. Be their free will or not, I'm not forcing anybody to live by my standards.
The point that the people who argue against privacy are liars which will abuse fears to try to get people on their side was missing so far. Thanks for adding it.
> "We need to record your likes to show you more stuff you like"
> The point that the people who argue against privacy are liars which will abuse fears to try to get people on their side was missing so far. Thanks for adding it.
Do you honestly believe that CCTV is completely useless wrt crime prevention and detection?
Counter 2: I don't trust you doesn't mean I trust no one. I wouldn't give you 20k to watch either, but I would give that much to a bank without a second thought.
The point about number two is that you don't get to choose who gets the information. Privacy means you choose what information about you is shared and with whom. An invasion of privacy is taking that control away.
1. Mark Zuckerberg has a much larger risk of negative privacy consequences than the average person. Also, this was probably done more for physical safety than for privacy.
2. If all of people’s emails we’re getting forwarded to random other people they encounter on online forums like HN, then people would be upset.
The point is that people don’t get terribly upset at extremely small risks of minor negative consequences from privacy issues.
These counterarguments are pretty weak, and are essentially:
Oh, so you don’t worry about getting struck by lightning? Then why don’t you go out in a field holding a lightning rod during a lightning storm? crickets
> The point is that people don’t get terribly upset at extremely small risks of minor negative consequences from privacy issues.
No, they don't get terribly upset because they don't (1) understand the potential consequences well enough and (2) it doesn't affect them until it does. We have a very clear mental model of what happens if we get struck by lightning (I go to the hospital and my skin gets charred) but we don't for data privacy.
Huh? Not sure what privacy policies have to do with this. I'm talking about the mental model for the consequences of giving your privacy up. The mental model for the getting hit by a lightning strike is pretty clear for most people...fire = physical hurt...giving privacy up? Not so much.
Laymen Argument 1:
Mark Zuckerburg who has majority control of the largest source of private data in the world bought the two plots of land next to him for privacy reasons.
Laymen Argument 2:
Forward me all of your emails if privacy isn't an issue. crickets
The average person doesn't care about these because it doesn't affect them right now, but it's a "boil the frog" situation...you won't know you're getting boiled to death until it's too late.