I dislike/disagree with facebook more than most folks, but even I can smell a dead horse being beaten.
The more this keeps up, the more concrete privacy issues will be in the minds of many.
And yet, HN is full of dismissals. I've decided that to many here, the idea of being in an "elite", informed group is more important than the actual issues.
Given that you are not the target audience of these stories, are you really in a position to judge whether they have reached "dead horse" status?
Isn't that an argument for not having HN filled with these articles?
They want the stories to stop because they fear the general public may finally be gaining awareness of the abuse they're being subjected to.
Do you mean to say it's voyeurism, i.e. the draw of being "informed"? Sitting in the eye of the panopticon?
I think people just have a tendency to focus on the positive things that might be gained from data mining. There's just a lot of naivete about how compromised an ad-supported business ultimately is.
HN is just for "breaking news." It has an established culture of re-posting "old" stories if they're interesting or informative in the context of more recent events.