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Comment by wybiral | Hacker News Reader

I've heard this argument for years but they keep on sliding back those privacy policies more and more. And every time a story comes out about how those policy changes were actually utilized to track people in a new way people get upset.

You're giving the average user too much credit. As a software developer lurking on Hacker News, sure, you understand how pervasive tracking and data collection are. But have you spoken to your parents or older relatives? My mom had no idea that kind of stuff was even possible. Most of those people still think that the core invasion of privacy us tech nerds are always going on about is the public content (the likes/follows/posts). I'm not patronizing, they genuinely don't understand the scale of modern online tracking.

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i've had a lot of conversations with a lot of people from various backgrounds about how they understand facebook tracking (it inevitably follows when i tell them i'm not on facebook) and i can't think of an instance where people had a poorer understanding of facebook's tracking than i gave them credit for. That's not to say people like it, but they accept it as an inevitable consequence of using the service. And of course, for all the tech crowd's fear about the "invasion of privacy" that comes from the passive behaviour monitoring facebook does, the reality is that likes, follows, and posts are the strongest signals for their ad targeting anyways.

a non-trivial number of people think that facebook is continually listening to their every conversation through the mic on their phone, and keep the app installed anyways.

The most common story i have heard from non-tech people about how they experience tracking is that Facebook (et al) must be listening to their (spoken) conversations. Say they talk about visiting a relative in another city, and they immediately start getting hotel and flight recommendations on their phone.

It always freaks them out when i run through all the ways this might have occurred, without voice recognition. Yes, they did a search, but on their work computer, yes they mentioned it in a pm, yes they put the dates into their calendar, yes they went to get a wrote from a travel agent. But these things are not connected are they?

Edit: They all understand the scale, they see the cause and effect, they just don't understand the how.

Eh, have you heard about that app in Spain that was listening for soccer games at bars to see if they were illegally broadcasting said game?

The problem here is FB 'might've do that directly, but is 100% happening they are getting metrics from other apps that directly listen to users or do what we would consider outright privacy violations. There is too much money and too little risk not to at this point.

> You're giving the average user too much credit.

It's not compelling to acknowledge that they understand and then turn around and say they need their hand held because they aren't responsible enough. This isn't a public safety issue.

Privacy isnt a public safety issue?

What does privacy mean in that context? Casting the term more widely doesn't crystallize the issues. If what I put or do on a 3rd party platform is subject to some concept of "privacy", then so is what pickles I buy at the store. Neither of these are public safety issues, unless you're ready to say that the govt needs to monitor and protect what people say and do on the internet. The same people you think you want to protect, have to write the laws and they are just as clueless with the benefit of various industry corruption behind them. Regulation is not a panacea here.

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