[apotheothesomai]

For years privacy-minded people have complained about the lack of recognition of privacy issues among the masses. Suddenly, story after story about aspects of Facebook's anti-privacy practices are being read by the public. This will lead to more stories about other data mining entities as well.

The more this keeps up, the more concrete privacy issues will be in the minds of many.

And yet, HN is full of dismissals. I've decided that to many here, the idea of being in an "elite", informed group is more important than the actual issues.

Given that you are not the target audience of these stories, are you really in a position to judge whether they have reached "dead horse" status?

[908087]

HN is full of dismissals because many on HN work at Facebook and other companies that rely on being able to continue abusing our privacy.

They want the stories to stop because they fear the general public may finally be gaining awareness of the abuse they're being subjected to.

[wu-ikkyu]

The hubristic disconnect between the technical minded people here on HN and the general masses of users is startling and indicative of the problem.

[fricat1ve]

>the idea of being in an "elite", informed group is more important than the actual issues.

Do you mean to say it's voyeurism, i.e. the draw of being "informed"? Sitting in the eye of the panopticon?

I think people just have a tendency to focus on the positive things that might be gained from data mining. There's just a lot of naivete about how compromised an ad-supported business ultimately is.

[Joeboy]

> Given that you are not the target audience of these stories

Isn't that an argument for not having HN filled with these articles?

[rainbowmverse]

Only if the subgroup "people who are tired of all this privacy stuff" is representative of HN's readership. There are more people reading than will ever comment. That's true of any community.