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by vkou 2443 days ago
Only large companies are capable of building a car that complies with emissions and safety expectations, but that doesn't mean that we'd be better off if there were tens of millions of black-smoke-spewing death-trap shitboxes on the freeway.

Frankly, given the long history of data abuse, security problems, and generally anti-human practices by IT and tech companies, I'd be perfectly fine if cowboy developers not be allowed to touch this product space.

That's not to say that large tech companies are blameless angels in any of this.

1 comments

Unfortunately I think your view is going to become the prevailing view and the internet is going to become cable 2.0. People are just obsessed with finding corners to round.

For some reason people think comparing loss of privacy when voluntarily visiting a website to deaths caused by car accidents isnt intellectually dishonest.

Why would it be?
You're almost right.

Sure, I don't value my privacy, the security of my financial information, etc as much as my life.

But it's close.

Again a false equivalence. Financial information is already protected by numerous regulations. We are talking about generic cookies that are being used for tracking user behavior for a large number of useful and benign purposes. Most of the data is already pseudonymous.