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Comment by iforgotpassword | Hacker News Reader

I've given up trying to convince people of taking privacy serious. It's usually just the "but I've got nothing to hide" debate that goes nowhere. Even half of my tech friends still use chrome, got Alexa at home and whatnot.

So instead with my non-techsavvy friends I usually just set up Firefox with ublock and tell them to give it a try. You don't have to mention ublock is available on chrome too, right?

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My hunch is that maybe 0.1% to 1% of people truly care about privacy. People love to talk about it and sound shocked about lack of privacy. But when it comes to actually changing behavior based on privacy, very few people actually do.

They may or may not care about privacy, but they do love an internet that's largely ad-free.

Most of them never knew it was possible, but I love to see how wide their eyes get when they see it. "Holy hells! you mean I don't have to look at all that crap?"

I'd argue that most people don't know privacy is possible too. I think the lack of concern is more lack of awareness. People are really freaked out when they think Facebook is listening to their conversations. Lots of people have the "how could they possible know that" story. That's a great starting point to talk about ML and how powerful data is.

In fact there's a sibling comment to yours asking what privacy difference there is between Alexa and a smart phone. And here we are on one of the most tech focused places on the internet! If everyone here doesn't know the difference, how is the average person?

The problem with non-techsavvy people is that they don't have an understanding of how seemingly innocuous data can be misused. My favorite counter to the "I have nothing to hide" argument is what happened during WW2 when the nazis used the consensus data of countries they invaded to hunt down their victims. People gave out this information because they had nothing to hide.

Another counter is what happened with the "anonymized" NYC data set. People discovered that combining two separate data sets can be used to reconstruct the information that was censored.

I have nothing to hide is a false statement that never made sense.

What is the privacy difference between having an Alexa device at home vs. having a smartphone or anything else with an embedded microphone?

While it's possible a cell phone (smart or dumb) might be transmitting audio without user knowledge, it's unlikely and, if discovered, would cause a huge PR nightmare for whoever was involved in making it happen. Voice assistants have been shown to transmit audio unexpectedly, humans are listening, nothing has been done to fix it, and no one is apologizing for it.

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