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Comment by joekrill | Hacker News Reader

_This_ particular version of the system does, yes. But the next iteration may slightly weaken the privacy for some "legitimate" reason. And the next version slightly more. Then just a bit more. All for seemingly legitimate reasons. That's the slippery slope.

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Why not just ask telecom companies for all their data? Quicker, stealthier and much easier.

There is not NEED to use this scheme in such a convoluted way. There are far better ways to spy, and the way to protect against it is through politics and laws.

Exactly. People worrying about what their smartphones could be leaking via a convoluted point-to-point aggregation process while every telephone conversation and email is routed through dozens of third-party machines with unaccountable auditing going on.

That's not a very impressive slippery slope if we've just concluded that the first step of it is horizontal.

If this system goes to some lengths to preserve privacy, slippery slope argument doesn't really apply.

That's a false sense of security. Change often starts with a lateral move, but one closer to the slope being acceptable.

Great. Then we should keep an eye out for the actual thing that's down the slope. Forgoing useful technologies because a slope exists is like refusing to mine coal because the uranium nearby could some day be used to build atomic bombs.

Neither of your example minerals are particularly healthy for humans, nor can they be made so without extreme efforts.

But we can agree there's a world of difference. There isn't a massive international storage and handling agreement for coal and its waste products, and no country has ever been preemptively bombed over mining too much coal.

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