[nonrandomstring]

> I think you overestimate the amount that the average person cares about their privacy.

We should reword this nearly-true claim to avoid spreading a pernicious myth. Let's try:

"I think you overestimate the amount that the average person understands about their privacy."

People care. They don't understand. Indeed, they are actively misled. That is not a fair foundation for assertions like "people don't care about X".

[Moto7451]

Very much this. The same people that feed large amounts of data to an ad network in exchange for videos of puppies can also be upset when they discover something about that same company that leads them to believe they’ve been harmed.

[zelphirkalt]

But lets also add, that so many of them will gladly believe everything an ad financed company tells them, just to have a bit of convenience and just so that they do not have to go against any network effect. All that, while people tell them, that they are being spied on. All that, while there is one personal data scandal after the other.

Many people are severly uninformed or have closed themselves off to information, that could disturb their comfort with FB and the likes (ha, pun not intended, but it works!). Many people are computer illiterates, addicted to their "drug of choice" and kept in place via network effect of "all their friends and family being on FB/WA/whatever" and they too are part of the problem, increasing the network effect.

I've had discussion with people, where I told them, that FB had the biggest personal data scandal in history (financially, in terms of what they had to pay), and that there is a new thing happening every month or so. Still these people do not want their way of being addicted shaken and continue regardlessly, dragging others down with them. I am sometimes at a loss what I can tell them, how I can explain to them what is happening. Telling them, that FB is running on ads, which are tailored to them, by spying on their behavior and mining that data. Nope, message not understood.

[nonrandomstring]

> But let's also add, that so many of them will gladly believe everything an ad financed company tells them, just to have a bit of convenience and just so that they do not have to go against any network effect. All that, while people tell them, that they are being spied on. All that, while there is one personal data scandal after the other.

You are so right, I can't argue against that. It's the same psychology and social dynamics as why people continue to smoke or use harmful street drugs while seeing the people around them dying or getting sick, and being told every day that it's harmful.

I tried to make as clear, and sensitively as I could in Digital Vegan [1] why I think some digital technologies are a major public health issue, and that we are in the same territory as with tobacco 50 years ago.

One problem is that unlike heroin and tobacco, where the sickness of the victims is a net burden on governments, consumer capitalism, being a form of proxy mass-surveillance, traps governments in an uneasy "see no evil" alliance, if not outright support for digital harms.

Another is that digital harms can be remote, deferred in time and place, thus difficult to connect causally. As with many diseases or pollutants we are still in the early stages of understanding the effects of damage to privacy.

[1] https://digitalvegan.net

[HKH2]

Privacy is often inconvenient. Understanding is inconvenient.

[nonrandomstring]

> Privacy is often inconvenient. Understanding is inconvenient.

You're so right. What else?

  - Safety is inconvenient

  - Growth is inconvenient

  - Success is inconvenient

  - Long term happiness is inconvenient

We could write a very, very long list of all the good things in life and find, at root, that they are "inconvenient".

That's why I consider the word convenience to be the modern form of the Greek work Thanatos, which is the "death drive" toward atrophy, stasis, forgetfulness and rigor mortis. Living is "Inconvenient", and because everything worth having costs something, convenience is "anti-life".

But that's a lot of beard-stroking philosophy. A more interesting question for hackers might be:

  "Exactly when did we become the arse-wipers of the world, coddling
  everyone in "convenience" lest their delicate brows produce a bead
  of sweat or their minds be troubled by a moment of doubt?"

Here's a quote from Digital Vegan pondering the writing of De Tocqueville:

  Political scientist Alexis De Toqueville writing in his 1840
  Democracy in America [DeTocqueville35] questions the perils of
  convenient systems so perfect in their pampering and coddling that
  they render life pointless. Of what today we would call cybernetic
  governance, he writes:
  
        `` That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and
        mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like
        that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood;
        but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual
        childhood: it is well content that the people should
        rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For
        their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it
        chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that
        happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and
        supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures,
        manages their principal concerns, directs their industry,
        regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their
        inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care
        of thinking and all the trouble of living?''