[jrowen]

I think there's a very interesting duality forming around privacy. It seems like most people don't really care if they're being filmed, or if their data is being slurped up six ways from Sunday, as long as it's aggregated and going through automated systems. But as soon as it feels like an actual person is looking at individual behavior, it's creepy (which is, of course, always a possibility, but plausible deniability is a powerful thing).

[singpolyma3]

Yes. This is it. People are used to "private conversation in public restaurant". It's not private because no one can hear, but because no one is listening.

[vitally3643]

Right, the very nature of human society for the last several thousand years has been privacy in public. You walk around outside where everyone can see you, but the societal expectation is that you don't watch others. You have conversations in public because that's where life happens, but they're still private conversations.

Every counter-example to this is people being intentionally creepy, inappropriate, or outright malicious. Which was a manageable problem when it was just a single dude being weird, society would eventually exclude and shun them. Trouble is today that we've mechanised malicious inappropriate behavior at scale and ensured we've set up our entire society and government such that the people responsible can never be held accountable in any way. So long as you're being maliciously creepy at scale (and you're wealthy) everything's fine and there's no consequences.

[dpoloncsak]

> Every counter-example to this is people being intentionally creepy, inappropriate, or outright malicious

Or you just...overhear something in public and strike up a conversation. Doesn't happen here in North-East USA often but that southern hospitality is a different animal

[dools]

I think creepiness manifests when the observation is one way. Without technology that’s kind of hard. With tech it becomes increasingly easy for everyday people to one-way spy on each other

[fwipsy]

How do you know what life was like 2000 years ago? I don't think you can truly know when this convention appeared. I suspect it's tied to urbanism at least. If you're living alone in the woods, miles from anywhere, and someone walks past your house, you're probably not going to politely ignore them.

[miki123211]

The other side of this is that there are aspects of privacy that average people absolutely care about, but that the tech crowd largely ignores.

It's things like hiding your online activity from your partner / boss / parent / ex, making sure nobody knows you just went to a gay club, hiding the fact that you're playing video games from that one guy you don't actually want to play with, not giving out your phone number to the parents of your students, that sort of thing.

For most people, E2E and VPNs are useless gimmicks that just make life unnecessarily difficult, but vanishing messages and incognito mode are life-saving features.

[latexr]

> It seems like most people don't really care if they're being filmed, or if their data is being slurped up six ways from Sunday

For the majority of people I don’t think it’s true that they don’t care, but rather that they don’t know, don’t understand the implications, or don’t have the luxury of being able to do anything about it.

In the instances where I was able to have a longer discussion with someone to really explain what’s going on, they did care. Even if they previously said they didn’t.

[ryukoposting]

Or, they do know and they do care, but they're so exhausted by the hostile patterns of our industry that they've given up.

[jrowen]

People do know on some level though. There was enough willpower to get the cookie bullshit on every website.

I think it's just that it's more of a visceral lizard-brain thing than a logical thing. Like how you can go through life eating meat every day, then someone sits you down and tells you the horrors of that industry and shows you a cow being butchered, and you go oh that's horrible, and then most likely put it out of mind and continue eating meat.

[m463]

it's not a duality at all. the people don't know.

the people doing the "analytics" (surveillance) like their privacy too, because they are doing creepy stuff and don't want people to know it. And even if they aren't doing creepy stuff, the data might be used that way in the future (profile building, psychological tricks, personalized pricing, sharing behavior with others, etc)

[raverbashing]

Yes - also it's one thing to say "A user entered the site, clicked here than here" (analyzed in bulk) and another "this specific guy entered the site, clicked here than here"

[iamacyborg]

Which is wild because the aggregation and “big data” element is where the harm actually happens in very real terms. Of course, much harder to explain to typical laymen.