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by comfypotato
1202 days ago
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Pointless yelling ensuing: why do you care if people track your chocolate spending? You’re not important enough for anyone to ever put your face to your name to your purchase of the chocolate. Forgive me if I’m talking to someone famous, but I’m not. Nobody gives a damn about you on the internet. They want to know you bought chocolate because they want to sell you more chocolate. That’s it! Just be grateful you don’t have to get off your ass to order the chocolate. I’ve never understood the hubbub over privacy. Outside of obviously malicious attacks (that we should be well-protected from) it all just seems that you’re being observed so that other people can make money. That doesn’t bother me if I’m getting something out of it (chocolate). There are extreme examples of employees with access viewing the data, but they should be considered statistically insignificant in the discussion because they’re so rare. |
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For example, Ralph Van Deman[1]. After being instrumental in the Philippine-American war (1899-1902)'s military intelligence division, creating some of the first (and incredibly far reaching) catalogs of potential enemies & associates & basically anyone anywhere near-by & using torture regularly to extract confessions/information, he came home to America... to start enormous files as leader of the new Military Intelligence on anti-War, labor, human rights & basically any American standing up or making any noise. Or who happened to be a couple degrees of separation away. Sending under-cover agents out to report back with unsigned reports, working under a veil of secrecy, & calling them "enemy agents" for not being happy-dumb American's & advocating voices.
Among many truly awful things, this lead to the sheriff of Bisbee gathering a vigilante posse of 2000, taking over the telephone network, and then leading the group by a car with a machine-gun mount on it (owned by the local mines of Phelps & Dodge), through Bisbee breaking into homes & pulling people out of beds at gunpoint. The strikers were told at gunpoint to get back to work, and 1186 refused & were shoved into passenger & cattle cars & hauled 180 miles under armed guard. Van Deman is far from personally responsible here, but he is an early leader of the modern world in weaponizing information against potential or related threats. You might be innocent, but if you talk to the wrong people or go to the wrong place, suddenly you're suspect, and maybe men with guns will come into your house & put you on a train out & that's that.
Creating systems that resist the impulse to corruption is necessary. "Abuse of power comes as no surprise", is one Holzer-ism. And what's safe today may not be safe tomorrow (power changes hands but records endure). And I think there is some essential need for human privacy at some level, that it's a gross & disgusting world if humans are deprived of a sense of independent identity, are too closely handled from above.
My example comes from American Midnight, which is a very very very long tale about awful things the US did just 100 years ago. It's well written and as the title says incredibly dark. A huge amount of the book touches on the power of information. We've seen other horrific examples in other states. It seems essential we have privacy, that we give people a sense that they have their own lives to live, with free choices.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Van_Deman