[briandear]

I honestly don’t care about the NSA; nothing I am doing would even be remotely interesting to them. I am more concerned about my privacy being exploited by advertisers, banks, credit bureaus, political campaigns, and over-zealous local governments.

[jjeaff]

But do you trust the NSA to store all your private data forever and keep it safe from hackers, other governments and even their own employees?

[majewsky]

You also need to assert that you will never care about the NSA. If, in the future, you decide to take up a public role of any sort, the NSA already has decades worth of dirt on you.

[dagss]

...assuming there is dirt to be found, I interpreted the parent as saying there would not be any dirt of interest to NSA

[majewsky]

I would be surprised if there existed a person whom you cannot get any dirt on.

[alrs]

Do intelligence agencies exist to "keep us safe", or to advance the state's economic interests?

[Lio]

I guess one could think of that as a false dichotomy. I’m not sure you can necessarily cleanly separate these two things.

[manigandham]

Those two things are more similar than they are different.

[geezerjay]

> I honestly don’t care about the NSA; nothing I am doing would even be remotely interesting to them.

If that's true then why are they dedicated to harvesting and processing all your data?

[vidarh]

They're not really. They just don't care enough about the privacy of all the people that don't matter to them. It's still troubling, because there is every reason to expect that people that have done nothing wrong will have someone poke around in their data for the wrong reasons, but I don't have a problem understanding why people are prepared to disregard them - most people will be noise to the NSA. Meanwhile most people are potential revenue to a marketer.