[bbarn]

How many people cared about those schematics? Most people would say "Gee, instead of this paper of things I don't understand, having a list of the radio stations in this spot would be more useful"

As someone who found computing in general through the joy of taking broken electronic things apart and trying to fix them, it does sadden me too when I see a black blob over a circuit board but most people are just happy they're cheap and easy to replace and toss em away. Most developers I know today can't understand basic electrical circuits, even though they are the very foundation of everything we do. But like my previous analogy, most would rather just see the magic happen when they install something, write a little bit of code, and see results.

Some of us do value privacy, security, and even the underlying things that make stuff work. We're in the minority. The vast majority of people simply don't even care. I've tried explaining it to my wife, or my mother, that some piece of software might track them, know about them, restrict them, whatever, and the opinion I usually get back is "Oh, it doesn't already do that?" People joke about Facebook ads being something they just talked about all the time and it doesn't even phase them that the reality is very near to that.

People simply don't care enough to make a change in the laws that would prevent things like this.

[api]

Privacy loss is like climate change. People don’t care because the really bad things haven’t happened yet. People who keep telling them about the bad stuff that is likely to happen are alarmists, and like with climate change there’s an industry with a vested interest in downplaying the issue.

A sneak peek may be coming with what some states are doing to police travel for abortion. Does the algorithm think you might be pregnant? Congratulations, you may now be stopped on state lines and charged with a crime because you are driving someone one state over. Even if you have no intent of getting an abortion you may have to prove that in court if a prosecutor is feeling particularly self righteous today.

People in the US are not accustomed to totalitarian politics. We have rights. But loss of those rights are one populist demagogue away.

When that happens all that surveillance and remote control will suddenly become as relevant as Antarctica’s Thwaites glacier would become if it fell in the ocean.

(Left wing populist demagoguery and authoritarianism are possible too. I’m just picking on the right wing sort because it’s the kind that has traction most recently. But that too can change.)

[ethbr1]

People don't care because privacy is invisible.

I'm turning to the opinion that if we really want to fix this, we need to have government mandates that "takeout" style exports are provided by every company/service, in a standard machine-readable format.

If you collect and store any personal data about a user, there needs to be a standard way for them to request a usable copy.

Then allow third parties to build tools that work with those to educate users, which is why standard and usable format are key criteria. E.g. "visualize what X knows about you"

It's the details that would motivate people, but the details are precisely what's invisible right now.

(Disclaimer: talking from a US-centric viewpoint, for the majority of states that don't have digital privacy rights)

[em3rgent0rdr]

> How many people cared about those schematics?

That’s the neat thing! For most people, you don’t! Until it breaks and you need to fix it, and the manufacturer is out-of-business. But then you can present that strange schematic to your local electronics repairer who can fix it up with a few spare commodity components.