[peterwwillis]

"Privacy violation" is a huge, gigantic category of all kinds of things. One kind of privacy violation is completely different from another; some privacy violations are completely harmless, and some are actually directly harmful, and some in between.

Giving jail time for any of these is like giving jail time for any kind of "offensive behavior". Maybe someone just didn't like what someone said and called it offensive, or maybe someone physically attacked someone else. You don't get jail time just because someone claimed offense, you have to prove harm, and fit the punishment to the crime.

This is why I can't take privacy advocates seriously. Their effort to fight for all privacy undermines the attempt to prevent real harm from specific kinds of information being exposed.

[feanaro]

How about systematic, deliberate, deceptive privacy violations in order to increase profits? That seems like a pretty distinct category from the cases you are concerned with.

[0xbadcafebee]

> systematic, deliberate, deceptive

I'll take your word for it, the evidence doesn't look clear cut to me,

> privacy violations

Again, who cares if it was just your shoe size? We should not send someone to jail for leaking who your favorite pop star is. Did it, or could it, do harm? This is a nearly universal standard used to assess how someone is punished according to the law.

> in order to increase profits

Of course it's to increase profits, you think they're doing it for fun? Did we stop living in a capitalist economy and nobody told me?

[feanaro]

The point is simple, though: they cannot do it to increase profits. Doing it for profit makes it more jarring than, say, collecting extraneous personal information through an error.

Your shoe size point is simply a strawman. You've chosen one arbitrary data point in order to make the argument look less important. In any case, I'm of the opinion that neither Google nor the governments of the world should be allowed to do this kind of large scale surveillance and profiling.

And finally,

> We should not send someone to jail for leaking who your favorite pop star is.

I agree with this completely. However if it's not just my favourite pop star, but it also contains all the articles I've read in the last two weeks, and my age, and what I've recently bought... All of these neat little data points about me, neatly filed in a profile made just for me, then the natural question that arises is: Why do you even have this? Who allowed you to start building this profile on me and on thousands of others? The systematicity and scale of it is hard to argue against.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> Again, who cares if it was just your shoe size?

Whoever cares, cares, and it's none of your business. Noone is suggesting that you should not be allowed to allow companies to collect your shoe size and sell that information, so you are mostly just missing the point.

There are people who do not want to allow that, and there is absolutely no reason why we should force them to allow it. Claiming that what you stole is of little value does not make your theft legal. It is simply not up to you to decide what has sufficient value to keep for other people. If you take something that is someone else's property without them transferring property rights to you first, that is theft, and it is completely irrelevant whether you think that they shouldn't value what you took.

> Did we stop living in a capitalist economy and nobody told me?

If anything, you seem to have a very confused understanding of capitalism. The one core idea of capitalism is strong individual property rights, because that is the basis for decentralized price discovery. Capitalism could not possibly work if the state simply declared that property rights for low-valued goods (based on a valuation decided by the state, presumably) a not enforceable, or if you could simply steal and use your competitor's machinery to produce goods as long as you didn't harm them (like, returned them repaired before their next production run, maybe?).

The fact that someone could make money by violating your property rights certainly never was a justification that allowed them to avoid punishment in a capitalist system.

[ben_w]

> Again, who cares if it was just your shoe size? We should not send someone to jail for leaking who your favorite pop star is. Did it, or could it, do harm?

All personal information makes fraud and blackmail easier. Even the seemingly mundane.

I won’t go into details because the relevant law already exists.

This brings me to my second point:

> Of course it's to increase profits, you think they're doing it for fun? Did we stop living in a capitalist economy and nobody told me?

Even in a capitalist society, doing illegal things for money is generally considered worse than doing illegal things without the expectation of getting paid.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> "Privacy violation" is a huge, gigantic category of all kinds of things.

This discussion is about intentional, systematic, large-scale violations of privacy by large corpotations. You pointing out (essentially) that sometimes your one neighbour tells your other neighbour how they heard this rumour about you is simply an attempt to derail the conversation, not a relevant argument.

> You don't get jail time just because someone claimed offense, you have to prove harm, and fit the punishment to the crime.

That's just nonsense. Talking away people's stuff without their consent is a crime. Noone has to prove any harm for you to be punished for theft. If the theft also harmed someone, they obviously can demand that you compensate them for their loss, but that is a completely separate issue.

Yes, the punishment has to fit the crime. And if you were the head of a multi-billion dollar corporation that made money by organizing the stealing of low-value goods from every person on the planet, that punishment presumably would be quite something in order to fit the crime.

[docker_up]

I specifically mentioned GDPR not something nebulous or not well defined. It's a level field. It appears Google has violated the GDPR, willfully even. I have no problem with execs going to jail over that.