How modern privacy violations would look like 35 years ago | Hacker News Reader

How modern privacy violations would look like 35 years ago

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30 pointsmyle6 comments

Wow, I have never seen the ACLU pizza video [0] (linked in the comments) before but it's fantastic. It hits all the points I try to explain to people about the importance of privacy in a much more succinct and clear way. I'm surprised it has so few views.

[0]: https://www.aclu.org/ordering-pizza

That's a good video, I'd never seen it either, but I'd like to paint an opposing pictures:

Me: calling a pizza place I've never ordered from before Hi, I'd like my usual. Pizza Place: Sure! Our pizza delivery drone will drop it off in 20 minutes.

That's the whole conversation. They have my order history from every pizza place ever, so they know what I want. My credit card number is on file, so they can just charge that. (Credit fraud is non-existent because of 24/7 surveillance and chargebacks). They have my GPS information so they know where to deliver the pizza. Add in a little bit of AI and cooperation between the different fast food vendors, and I could skip the conversation entirely. My favorite pizza would just show up when I get hungry!

This is still creepy, but it's a much better future than one where a pizza shop operator is catty about my beach body.

Imagine being anywhere in the world and being able to simply press a button on your phone and having the best local approximation of your favorite pizza delivered to you...

As someone who is trying to sample anything remotely unfamiliar wherever I travel.. totally useless :P

> In the evening you go to the library to return a book. They have a list of book suggestions ready that fits your taste suspiciously well.

Hah! If that'd be true...

I strongly suspect modern recommendation engines have absolutely no clues about the plot/tropes/character traits/content in general and only operate on score correlations and basic genre tags. Because more than half of the suggestions I got for books, movies and games (and I willingly fed the data!) weren't something that fit my tastes well. Maybe just remotely.

(I must admit I have crappy tastes, though.)

And of course they keep on recommending books you already read.

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