[illiac786]

I never mentioned making an arrest?… Just preventing the crime from happening because then it will be too late.

We don’t wait for a pedestrian to be run over by a car to decide that a specific road is too unsafe for a specific speed, we tend to implement appropriate speed limits to prevent such irreversible things like death from happening.

Same applies with privacy. Once a person’s data is out there, you can’t take it back anymore, so if someone every finds a way to make money out of it to the detriment of this person, it’s too late. You can arrest this someone, then the next one will pop up and do the same with the same data.

[WendyTheWillow]

Yes, we definitely waited for pedestrians to be hit before deciding road speeds need to be regulated. We waited until long after many pedestrians were struck by vehicles before even considering solutions. And I can't believe I have to say this, but someone dying by getting hit by a car is more serious than someone's SSN getting leaked.

If this is such a big issue, why hasn't more happened already? Why don't we see massive insurance denials based on Facebook posts? Where are the droves of people denied loans because it's leaked they use crypto? There was a huge Ashley Madison data dump some years ago, yet there were no mass firings or even divorces as a result.

Honestly, if nothing big comes out of this DNA leak, I think the idea that privacy is critically important is dead. If someone's DNA being leaked out into the world doesn't matter in a meaningful and systemic way, then there's nothing here.

[illiac786]

> DNA leak

DNA was not leaked. ancestry only.

>someone dying by getting hit by a car is more serious than someone's SSN getting leaked.

yes, I don't see why the analogy is not valid anymore though. Analogy was about preemption, not gravity of the issue.

>If that's such a big issue, why hasn't more happened already?

Don't know, but we are running circles, my point is, we shouldn't wait for more to happen. I thought you got that.

[WendyTheWillow]

I don't get that, because we wait for people to do crimes before we punish them.

[illiac786]

again, I'm not talking about arrest or punishment.

I'm talking about prevention. Like "don't walk at night in this area alone".

[WendyTheWillow]

That rule is as a result of bad things happening while walking alone at night.

I know what you’re talking about, I just don’t think you realize how such things become rules. We very rarely, if ever, create preventative rules, and when we do the rules are terrible because we don’t know the issue well enough.