← Back to context

Comment by XorNot

3 hours ago

Which are quippy and dismissed because they fundamentally misunderstand privacy. There is such a concept as "privacy in a crowd" - you expect, and experience it, every day. You generally expect to be able to have a conversation in say, a coffee-shop, and not have it intruded upon and commented upon by other people in the shop. Snippets of it may be overheard, but they will be largely ignored even if we're all completely aware of snippets of other conversations we have heard, and bits and pieces have probably been recorded on peoples phones or vlogs or whatever.

That's privacy in a crowd and even if they couldn't describe it, people do recognize it.

What you are proposing in every single one of these, is violating that in an overt and disruptive way - i.e.

> "Let's send your mom all your text messages."

Do I have anything in particular to hide in my text messages, of truly disastrous proportions? No. But would it feel intrusive for a known person who I have to interact with to get to scrutinize and comment on all those interactions? Yes. In much the same way that if someone on the table over starts commenting on my conversation in a coffee-shop, I'd suddenly not much want to have one there.

Which is very, very different from any notion of some amorphous entity somewhere having my data, or even it being looked at by a specific person I don't know, won't interact with, and will never be aware personally exists. Far less so if the only viewers are algorithms aggregating statistics.