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Comment by gobengo | Hacker News Reader

> People, by and large, seem to be totally okay with storing data in the cloud

It's simply not true, or if it is, it's only because of what you're choosing to looking at to build your view of how it 'seems'.

https://mydata.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula... https://ethereum.org/en/ https://solid.mit.edu/

Meeting every week: https://identity.foundation/working-groups/secure-data-stora...

> All things considered, data breaches are rare, and if they do happen, they're usually to be blamed on configuration blunders, not the services at large.

Did you work at Google? Do you know about PRISM? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#C...

Can't tell if you're intentionally or accidentally misleading.

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> Can't tell if you're intentionally or accidentally misleading.

All I'm doing is looking at the market cap of companies like Facebook and Dropbox. I mean, hell, Facebook literally sold personal data and sure, you occasionally see "boycott FB" movements, but they're all bark and no bite.

This is sort of like saying people are okay with cancer because they buy certain plastics in mass. The reality is people are ignorant of what is good for them in a ton of applications, including this one.

Only a handful really grasp the context of what is happening with their data and most importantly how their data could affect them.

People routinely do things against their own interest. It's up to the other people that care about this issue to make competing products that don't harm. There's simply no way to get everyone to really care about an issue with nuance and/or niche knowledge.

I don't think you're giving people enough credit. It's not exactly a mystery at this point that Facebook/IG make their money by selling access to your information to advertisers. People really just don't care which doesn't make them ignorant and doesn't mean they're wrong to not care. We're the privacy obsessed weirdos. I've been in conversations where people talk about products they "discovered" through IG ads.

The mindset where we're the only ones that really understand what's going on and everyone else are just sheeple -- sheeple I tell you is gross. This issue really isn't all that nuanced. That's just the lie we tell ourselves because we don't want to admit that we're the nutters being like "they're watching you scroll through Facebook and they're gonna use that to lower your credit score. THE ALGORITHMS!!"

I'm proud to be part of this weird club but let's not use it as an oppertunity to shit on our outgroup.

We may be interested in the deep details/debates the general public has no knowledge about. However i can assure you many people care about their privacy. They're not all ignorant, but they're usually powerless.

Wanna keep in touch with friends? Gotta use facebook. Wanna watch cool videos? Gotta use Youtube. etc.

But there's a very strong movement of non-tech persons for privacy, decentralization and free software/culture. In France, it's best exemplified by the Framasoft association which started from a network of teachers : https://framasoft.org/en/

Malice, apathy, ignorance, or simply don't care. They all look the same from a distance. With the same outcome.

You eat your ham sandwich. But did you hear the pig cry out at the slaughter? The same people reading your comment right now are the same people sticking the knife in you.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." --Upton Sinclair

In 1998 people turned their back on the FSF and joined the "open source" initiative. Everything that has happened since has been inevitable.

I'm in France, and have met some of the excellent folks who help framasoft with their project to degooglize the Internet.

I know a number of people who dispair, thinking they can't protect their privacy. But gradually, those who know a geek may be moving towards better software, as privacy respecting options with decent UX get developed, and as their FOSS-geek friend or family member patiently points out tools they can actually use.

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