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Comment by renjimen | Hacker News Reader

I was nodding along with your comment, wondering why it had been downvoted until I reached your last statement and couldn't tell if you were being serious or not.

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The parent poster is likely mimicking the people asking why are you asking me move to another app when this app does everything fine?

To be honest, I'm not well versed in the debate of privacy, but invariably in discussing user tracking by BigCo's a lot of my friends just say "I don't care if they have my data, I've got nothing to hide."

I've been thinking about this a bit recently, and the saying should be extended to "I've got nothing to hide, now." Things change and either you'll do something which you'll want to hide, or society/politics/community will change which you'll have something to hide.

An example in the first case is that you'll want to buy a secret gift for someone, but because of the tracking the surprise will be spoiled because they'll be seeing ads for it on their systems.

Are they not right though? People don't really care about "privacy", they just want it to work, and work with their friends. You or I can harangue all we want but it doesn't change the fact that people don't care in aggregate.

The next time someone says me "I have nothing to hide" I'm thinking of asking their salary because in my experience when people say that they actually mean they are not afraid of jail but would rather don't have a lot of details being made public like who they vote, their sexual preferences, their wealth or their personal opinion of a lot of their colleagues. Most of these details are easily inferred from their online behavior, not to mention personal chats. Part of the problem is that no one is going to say "I have something to hide". I'm not going to continue this rant because HN is not the audience that needs it but to summarize: defending privacy is an uphill battle and people are not right.

I think (and hope) he’s just relying the difficulty of communicating the concept and value of techno-privacy to his friends and relatives - as opposed to the immediate and self-evident differential between whatsapp and sms texts.

Indeed, I was playing the devil's advocate. I definitely care about privacy and I am quite an ardent supported of projects that try to solve this issue. I just learned that if privacy comes at a large expense (losing their social graph or unfriendly UX), people will not care for it. So I guess we need to do better so we can have both privacy and good UX.

I'd hoped so! Somethings are lost in text and you know what they say about assuming

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