[thebokehwokeh2]

For one, I don't think most people are acutely aware that this is what is going on. The HN reading crowd is the enlightened technical elite. We know that this is the transaction which occurs whenever we do something for "free" on the internet. Regular people may wonder why something as sophisticated as this is free, but are not aware that the cost is privacy. They just think "oh, this is a cool free fun thing. Awesome!" and be on their way.

Even then, the surprising, and technically not against TOS, open secret to every single social app that leverages it, is the comparative ease with which one could scrape a user's peer nodes' entire public history without explicit permission from said node. This is the thing that allows for all those "you may know" invite suggestion engines.

And this is by design, obviously, as it is literally the only thing that makes facebook valuable.

[PaulStatezny]

> Regular people may wonder why something as sophisticated as this is free, but are not aware that the cost is privacy.

Precisely. Acting astonished at why people are upset just shows a disconnect from the reality of the masses.

Free, valuable products are all over the internet: Google Docs, Trello, WhatsApp, Waze, Spotify...just to barely scratch the surface.

It’s not obvious to most users that the costs of some of these includes privacy violation / spying on the user.