Comment by lostgame | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lostgame | Hacker News Reader

As a lesbian - this is terrifying.

Not for myself - because I’m out - but because the fact that I am out would potentially be for sale, and - for instance - my primary partner - isn’t.

She comes from such a traditional family, and her home country is so anti-queer - that if they somehow found out her parents would literally likely commit suicide - the exact same thing happened to a friend of hers, and it’s unfortunately a very real concern.

This marks the official crossing of the line from any potential ‘if you don’t have anything to hide, why do you care’ bullshit excuse that fucking idiots use to push privacy issues aside.

If you are not out - it is not okay for ANYONE you don’t know to know you’re gay/lesbian/bi/whatever.

This is a brutal fucking outrage. I’m frankly fuming, like - on the verge of an anxiety attack - over this.

Lawsuits had better fucking ensue.

Frankly, this makes me want to preemptively leave HER (the lesbian equivalent of Grindr) - before I find out the same shit is happening.

Die, Grindr. Fucking die.

As a queer person this may be the single greatest abomination I’ve seen a corporation claiming to support the LGTBQ+ community commit.

> She comes from such a traditional family, that if they somehow found out they’d literally likely commit suicide.

"they" in this case is the family finding out and the family committing suicide? or did "they" change mid-sentence. Sounds bad for any party finding out, just trying to understand the threat model here. If your primary partner found out about the widely reported data leak existing and becoming suicide sounds now extremely probable. The other possible readings of that sentence are, extreme, but less extreme in probability.

Just a couple readings of this that aren't clear.

It’s perfectly clear given the context.. no one’s family member commits suicide over finding out their relative is gay.

I think GP is saying there are countries with stigma against homosexuality that family members would kill themselves to find out that their children were gay. That’s what I understood.

Absolutely, 100%.

Narrator: it wasn’t clear. The family member was who was being referred to.

You are fortunate to have grown up in a culture where that is mostly true. However, in some cultures, the "shame" of that disclosure about their child is considered worse than death. Horrifically sad, but true.

"culture" or torture chamber?

Her parents, sorry. Edited. A very similar thing happened to her friend, so it’s a reasonable concern. Her home country is fucked in that regard.

> ...the single greatest abomination I’ve seen a corporation claiming to support the LGTBQ+ community commit.

Just wait a few months, something else will probably show up. Remember that "claiming to support the LGBTQ+ community" is, in almost every case, just a calculated way to increase their profits. Change a few logos, let the PR department fund a float, and wait for the additional dollars to roll in!

> Frankly, this makes me want to preemptively leave HER (the lesbian equivalent of Grindr) - before I find out the same shit is happening.

Good. Do it. The entire core of our modern consumer tech ecosystem is based around this sort of deception and lying. If it's a popular app, it's making the money on the backend somewhere. Robinhood (the stock trading app) was literally just selling off order flows to the high frequency traders who would pay them rather obscenely large sums of money for the "Heyo, I've got someone ready to buy 15 shares of GME, I'm going to buy 15 shares of GME now, and... buy!" data. They existed to sell out an audience who didn't know better for fractions of a cent per trade, but in volume.

If you don't mind some dense reading, Zuboff's book on Surveillance Capitalism is well worth the read. The author is just in love with high scoring Scrabble words for no good reason, unless she finds a reason to invent a new word instead. But the outcome of it is that you'll want to regularly frisbee your smartphone across the room into the nearest wall without a case.

"Modern consumer tech" is absolutely, 150%, at odds with any concept of personal privacy. And the more people start opting out, the sooner we can go back to "My personal habits are not your profits."

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