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Comment by standyro | Hacker News Reader

I respectfully disagree with you. Most people (in the US) do not care. I used to work for an adtech company which engaged with all sorts of third party vendors (like Axciom, BlueKai, etc) and every time I would explain my job to most friends or strangers, people often rightly assumed that shady data dealing is what was going on behind ads and services like Facebook and seemed not to care. There has been little appetite to change this until recently, and frankly only because of Donald Trump. No one seemed to mind the Equifax hack, and no one wants to change their lifestyle or stop using services they enjoy just to support privacy. Until a company like Google or Facebook gets completely hacked and some truly incredibly embarrassing personal information gets made public on a mass scale, I think that sentiment in the US will continue.

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Most people in the US may not care, but that's because they simply do not understand how it will (or already is) affect them.

The average person thinks that, at worst, they'll just see ads that are more intelligent or targeted. Who cares, right?

The do NOT realize that these troves of data are going to be used to someday deny them health insurance, get them fired or not hired for some job, get screwed in job pay and benefit negotiations (due to companys like Experian selling you pay history to employers), be charged more than other consumers for the same product (due to being able to pay more), getting denied for loans or charged higher interest rates, not accepted to a school, refused entry in establishments because you're not a 'good' customer, etc.

And that is just what big business will do.

Wait 'till big governments around the world see just how much power the Chinese are able to exert over their populace playing the same data games.

Perhaps Americans are just confident that if these things start happening there will be ample opportunity to implement legislative fixes.

I mean c'mon...."Refused entry into establishments"? Unless the Civil Rights Act of 1964 somehow gets repealed I don't see this as very likely.

Legislative fixes would need to be implemented by the Congress — an institution trusted by only about 25% of Americans [1]. So I don't think it's fair to say that there is widespread confidence that this can be fixed with legislation.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/01/17/578422668/heres-just-how-litt...

The main reason why this is illusionary is that you can't see it when data is used against you. With a sample size of one it would be perfectly indistinguishable from bad luck or just bad individual performance.

> they simply do not understand [...] The average person thinks that [...] The do NOT realize

This reeks of elitism. I'm not sure it's clear what the average person thinks and one could hope that the average person is smarter than this and wouldn't guess what the average person thinks. To not only guess what we, the average, think but to also so confidently predict the future to me demonstrates below average reasoning.

I never understood the following: an online profile is built out of many scraps of data, each data point on its own is not very conclusive (like search history, I am searching for many things, how can they conclude anything from an instant curiosity I had in the past?) Could it be that that customers of this data may see the result as not very conclusive after all? Can we collectively help them to reach such a conclusion by ignoring online advertising?

Wouldn't it be great if all this data aggregation/privacy invasion business reaches a point of diminishing returns just because the subject of the manipulation has developed an immunity to all of it?

We need an online behavior randomization gadget that turns our valued personal data trail into garbage, obfuscation to the rescue.

On the other hand the only thing that counts is the credit card purchase history of a person - and it is impossible to randomize that one (short of sharing the card with your kids)

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