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Comment by billiam | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, but the obvious sarcasm expressed here is all too common among the slightly younger engineers and related tech company people I work with. They believe that trading traditional notions of privacy for the shiny, novel conveniences of Uber and Google Now is totally worth it, and they see no downside. There are a lot of reasons, I think. The biggest is that for most, there really isn't a downside, yet. How many people are now identifiably being turned down for jobs, apartments, dates, and airplane tickets based what the four or five companies that define our identities online record, store, calculate, and sell? But does anyone doubt that the private civic space in the real world is being slowly paved over by digital identity robber barons? All these friends of mine care about is getting into Google IO to help that company build Larry's libertarian island (look it up), without wondering why they might have been turned down for a ticket.

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> How many people are now identifiably being turned down for ...

There's the rub. For the most part you'll never know, unless it reached epidemic proportions.

"Sorry the apartment's gone" - Google told me you had financial problems 15 years ago.

"" (silence) - We infer from the internet you're gay so won't be offering you a job interview. It's illegal discrimination but can't be proven.

The effects of losing privacy in the scenarios you list are mostly invisible. The chilling effect on having legal but fringe or unpopular views has already been demonstrated.

So there is a downside for many. They just don't realise it.

... but there is no downside for the vast majority... so, winning?

You can't infer that, just as I can't infer there is for the majority. There's not enough data.

I suspect there is downside for far more than is generally believed.

How many jobs carry some googling of candidate? Nearly all of them.

You can now discriminate against just about anything you can dscover in search. Politics, religion, "too many" photos of parties, pro or anti any topic. None of these things are the business of an employer or landlord and would never come up pre-google unless you chose to share them in your application.

It's naive to assume none of these occur extensively. Gender discrimination has been illegal for years yet is still widespread.

But you are conflating two things. The data companies collect on me without me knowing is not related to the data that can be googled on me. Because I know about the later and have a level of control over it.

... what does your point have to do with allo ?

> How many people are now identifiably being turned down for jobs, apartments, dates, and airplane tickets based what the four or five companies that define our identities online record, store, calculate, and sell?

Brendan Eich lost his job due to information stored in a database.

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