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Comment by throwayEngineer | Hacker News Reader

Edit, remember not to shoot the people asking questions

I'm not sure why that data is so horrifying. I work a job that I willing put on Facebook, and I live in a house i am a registered voter at.

You can probably guess my route to work.

I'm unsure why this is bad, it sounds more useless than anything.

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Location data tells me how often you go to the gun shop and the shooting range, when your house is empty, which political protests you go to, how often you visit the pharmacy/doctor, what prostitutes you visit, what gay bars you visit, how often you break the speed limit, how much sleep you get, when you visit your lawyer or your STD clinic, whether you've kept up going to Alcoholics Anonymous, what restaurants you go to and how often, how often you're late for work, and how often you visit your grandma.

I'm not an Iranian gay gun owner, but I still have a problem with an advertising company assembling a database of Iranian gay gun owners.

Why?

Don't you want to hear your different lawyer options, STD check options, gun options, alcohol help, etc?

Or rather, would you rather have useful advertisement or spammy advertisement?

I still could not relate that those would be bad. The only thing I can imagine is blackmail. Which is cultural and not moral.

  I still could not relate that
  those would be bad.

I believe the ad tech industry would literally show alcohol ads to recovering alcoholics if A/B testing or 'machine learning' said they converted at higher rates.

I believe the ad tech industry does not protect medical and political data with the appropriate level of privacy protection. So even if they wouldn't sell their database of gay Iranians to Iran, I think they'd get hacked by them.

And I believe some companies probably would sell their gun ownership database to a government that wanted to arrest gun owners, and their gay bar customer database to a government that wanted to arrest gay people.

  Or rather, would you rather have
  useful advertisement or spammy
  advertisement?

I run an adblocker, so you can guess my answer to that!

Is there any proof this happens?

The hacked thing is about as scary as it gets, but companies need to keep customers happy.

Btw, ad block is not a solution. Short sighted to mention that.

Ah, the old "I have nothing to hide". Just one of many obvious rebuttals: We need to be a large anonymous crowd to protect those among us most in need of anonymity: whistleblowers, activists, stalking victims, to name a few.

Hmm a stalking victim could not use Android / Google maps.

This sounds like potential for profit.

Interesting.

I'm assuming this already exists but 95% of people don't need it?

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