Comment by lifeisstillgood

I disagree that tracking leads to lower quality discussion - for example I know my name and identity is tied to this account and instead of responding to "lack of ...thinking" with an insult I am forced to come up with intelligent responses (now you try ... it's really annoying isn't it :-)

I also explicitly ask for real life examples and studies of harm - I can imagine and create examples but I much prefer the real world to my imagination as a guide. We learnt that as basis of science.

I also think there is a difference between privacy and secrecy. You seem to conflate the two - if your actions online were secret then advertisers would not send you smoking ads. Secrecy is probably impossible - privacy is merely the politeness of our neighbours. And at scale politeness is enforced - by social norms and sometimes legal measures. We are seeing this come in (GDPR) but it's hard to have legal enforcement before the social norms have arrived.

On the smoking ad front, Gabriel Weinbergs main argument is that searching for "red men's trainers" should be enough to serve ads without having to know if I am a 20 something graduate in wisconsin or a middle aged bloke in London. And I suspect he is right within a few percentage points.

As for online grooming -yeah this is a huge danger. Every parents nightmare. And still absolutely something that needs to be enforced in the real world. And may need extra police and social resources. But if we want to stop predators reaching out to vulnerable children then it requires co-ordination amoung many groups onleine and offline - funding, political will, training education over many years.

There will be no quick fixes for the problems tech is bringing - but I remain optimistic that the cost benefit ratio is worth it and that we can vote for and require change to defend against the dangers

which takes me back to my point - what are the real world examples of dangers so we can make sensible policy