[timrice]

So I have a pi hole for my home network, and a wireguard connection back to it when I'm out and about. I run ublock on everything, block all the javascript, all the stuff.

But I do it because ads are annoying -- I don't like how they look and I don't like how they slow down every experience. I...don't really care about the tracking aspect? As far as I can tell, nothing bad happens to people because some faceless entity is tracking all your browser history.

Is there some secret malice that I'm not aware of that I should be more concerned about? Near as I can tell all this vast tracking infrastructure is really only there to more precisely target me with ads and doesn't really do anything else.

As far as privacy goes, I'm much more weirded out by the fact that my property tax records are public. Or that cell providers have the ability to fairly accurately track my location if they want to. Facebook seems pretty benign compared against that.

[number6]

The argument goes, that if they can target you for ads they can also correlate this with political beliefs, your ethnicity, your financial situation and so one.

If you want a credit and you are friends with people who don't pay back their debts you are also a risk for the bank and get a higher rate.

If you want an insurance and you are a extrem cyclists you won't get one.

If you open a shopping side and they know you can afford it, they mark up the price. (Udemy is ridiculously doing this)

Yes, this is death by a thousand paper cuts.

What could the Chinese Government do with the data? Lower or rise your social credit score? Stop you from visiting China. Throw you in Jail for watching Winnie Poo?

All the other tech giants were in the US and so we didn’t have to worried about this. At least if you weren't a terrorist or behaved like one. Now China has a totally different agenda.

Is it okay to be LGBTQ in China? What happeneds if you watch a TikTok with this theme?

[timrice]

Yes, I am very aware of all the potential dangers, which contributes to my blocking everything in the first place. I am curious if, in the United States, there are any realized dangers to these privacy violations.

The Udemy thing is interesting, but it's also (as far as I can tell) just doing stuff with first party cookies and region lookups. Nothing at all the level of sophistication that is being observed from Meta or Tiktok.

I'd love to hear stories of people who got screwed because of facebook or Google's broad web of surveillance, but as near as I can tell, nobody is actually being harmed.

[number6]

Google and Facebook coin it as violation of their terms. Just watch HN and you will get the next story every other month.

But the most chilling quote is "we kill people based on metadata":

As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has said, “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.” When I quoted Baker at a recent debate at Johns Hopkins University, my opponent, General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker’s comment “absolutely correct,” and raised him one, asserting, “We kill people based on metadata.”

[timrice]

I'm not entirely sure what you're hinting at. Are you saying that the US military and intelligence agencies use metadata to track down and kill people that they deem as enemies? And that Meta/Google/etc. are in cahoots with them to do this?

Can you link me example of this happening? Is there credible evidence that an ordinary citizen (like myself) is in more danger from state actors because of the information harvesting that large corporations engage in? I feel like if the government wants to track down and kill me they already have my address, cell phone records, etc. No need to contact Meta or Tiktok.

[number6]

You write this as if this wasn't common knowledge: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosu...

If they had no need for contacting Meta and Microsoft and Google, why did they do so?

How could would this put an ordinary citizen at risk? I don't know. All the data is run through an AI and if it labels you terrorist, who is to question it?

They sure kill a lot of people in Pakistan based on this data:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n...

[bpye]

> At least if you weren't a terrorist or behaved like one.

Though sadly there are plenty of false positives here too...