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Comment by icxa | Hacker News Reader

> Most people couldn't care less about this,

Please stop saying things like this. Ironically, this is a "HN-ism". It is first a misunderstanding of people, and secondly a misunderstanding of privacy.

People care about their privacy when it comes up. Until people start being personally impacted, not much movement will happen. Saying "your facebook data was leaked to some analytics firm" is not going to trigger much panic. Saying "your credit card was stolen by hackers" would, which is why people reacted much more voraciously to the Target breach, than Facebook.

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This is not hn-ism, multiple studies such as Viber study, Stanford study by Athey et al have proven than less than 1 in 4 people care about privacy. Even within those who care, vary few can resist small reward in exchange for divulging valuable personal data. In Stanford study, for example, vast majority of students were willing to give out their friend's email addresses for a pizza. I recently visited car dealer where they asked for SSN and my annual income before finalizing purchase and I asked them why they need that information. The person looked at me as if I was the first person to question that.

That example causes panic because there’s an immediate major financial threat (yes, those charges can be reversed, but it’s still scary)

A better comparison would be something like “that hotel you spent a week in has a hidden shower camera and an employee has been found secretly spying on guests”

I think your better comparison has reinforced my point that maybe I didn't convey clearly: If that secret spying doesn't cause any material harm to the individual, they are less likely to respond. Maybe some minor outrage of course, and some expressed displeasure for it to discontinue. Besides, going off of your hotel example, I imagine that if you explained to a Facebook group of parents that hey those videos you are all sharing of your little ones are being exposed to peeping Toms, you'd have a nice little outpouring of outrage.

Part of this is also the complete and utter failure of good journalism on tech issues. This is HN, we are all technologists here right? How many times have you read a NYT, WaPo, or some of the newer "media" like HuffPo reporting on some tech only to facepalm at the number of woeful inaccuracies and misrepresentation of the facts or situation, yet we are to trust them to report on complex privacy and security issues effectively? It's Gell-Mann amnesia over and over again.

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