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Comment by fyoving | Hacker News Reader

Yes it's lip service but this whole narrative about online/digital privacy was seize on by traditional media to bash tech companies while driving traffic to their properties. It also gives some academics and "experts" an outlet to promote their books.

You have the right to choose not be watched while you're going to the bathroom but the whole online privacy "controversy" is a means by which foreign countries and other interested parties try to justify stifling US tech companies it's also more nonsense for the self appointed "elites" to philosophise over and pretend to know what's best for society, regular people don't care about it nor should they.

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Never listen to experts! They think they can advise us on what to do, just because they happen to have deep knowledge and relevant experience with the issues at hand. How arrogant of them! </sarcasm>

There is a difference between actual experts and academic title profiteers.

Just like there's a difference between a month old account defending the tech behemoths with dubious claims and a real argument. We can figure the difference by ourselves no worries.

Zuboff, Solove, Schneier, etc.

>the whole online privacy "controversy" is a means by which foreign countries and other interested parties are using to try and justify stifling US tech companies

Do you have a source? Would like to read up on this.

I think they are talking about GDPR, but GDPR actually hurts smaller European companies more than it hurts big tech.

> this whole narrative about online/digital privacy was seize on by traditional media to bash tech companies while driving traffic to their properties. It also gives some academics and "experts" an outlet to promote their books.

[...]

> regular people don't care about it

Who's buying the books and visiting traditional media properties then?

Fair point, but there are lots of reasons to skim an article and not every academic is getting rich off of hawking their books, sometimes it's an excuse to talk about their publishings, and one could get consulting gigs out of the attention.

The masses though, they don't care:

"Facebook users care less about privacy than regulators"

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-growth-analysis-...

I can't see anywhere in that article any mention of what Facebook users think about online privacy, let alone that they don't care.

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