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Comment by headphonepoopr | Hacker News Reader

I am appalled by this and I hope they have to pay for it as much as others in this thread but, I'm sorry, categorizing hypothetically selling your data which could hypothetically be used for harm as a "human rights violation of the utmost degree" really dilutes the severity of real human violations that have actually happened (see I don't know, child rape, forced sterilization etc). That's an interesting choice of framing.

Why openly disclose your sexual preference/orientation so eagerly on hacker news comments, then?

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What do you think would happen to an LGBT person in, say, Saudi Arabia? The answer is, "capital punishment, fines, public whipping, beatings, vigilante attacks, vigilante executions, torture, chemical castrations, imprisonment up to life and deportation." Those seem like they're well into the category of "real human violations."

This is also not a hypothetical situation -- something quite similar happened in Egypt a few years ago [1]. And that was using good old fashioned entrapment. The damage could have been far more significant with large-scale data analysis.

While I can't speak for OP: they likely feel comfortable posting about their gender/sexuality on here because they live in a place where that won't happen. And while HN is often less than progressive on LGBT issues, users here generally aren't calling for public executions. But not everyone lives in the US or Western Europe, and these people live under a genuine threat of death.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Saudi_Arabia

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/egypt-l...

If I decide to tell you, or everyone who reads HN comments, that I'm gay, then that's up to me. I can choose whether and how to disclose, or not to disclose, depending on my evaluation of risk, which will be fairly accurate because I have a lifetime of experience in making such risk assessments and seeing how they play out. (In this case I'm not too worried, because I've been out for a long time, so if it gets broadly fashionable again to discriminate against us queers then I already have the same problems in either case.)

If I use a dating app that promises it will maintain its data about my orientation as confidential, and that app turns out to have been lying all along, then I'm forced to run the risk no matter whether I would have chosen to do so. Because I can't know who is accessing that data or what they're doing with it, I don't even have a way to know how much risk I've been forced to take on. And because I have no way to remove my information from the dataset, I don't have any control over how long that risk continues to be present; I have to assume it's forever, or at least as long as a copy still exists.

It's a good example in microcosm of all the issues around handling sensitive data that this industry has had ever since anyone began trusting us with such data in the first place.

I agree with all that you and lostgame have posted, but I think it's irrelevant in modern times. There are so many ways to track us (that are probably being stored indefinitely) that your sexual orientation, private religious or political beliefs, or anything else that can be gleaned from your movements and associations will be available for any future administration that decides a certain class of people should be rounded up.

The Holocaust, through computerized processing of census data (via IBM), found "Jews" who didn't even know that their maternal grandmothers were Jewish. Comparing those primitive records and tech to today is like comparing Hiroshima to the nukes of today. If some US administration 20 years from now decided that they wanted to round up all of the communists, homosexuals, and Jews with a 90% certainty, even assuming technology hasn't advanced an inch in the interim, they could get the list within days. I think it would be easy even if we turned off the data spigots today and 20 years from now they only had access to data collected between the dawn of web 2.0 and now.

I've never been all that favorably inclined to the counsel of despair.

That goes double when we're discussing an issue that goes to the heart of how we as an industry conduct ourselves - to what standard we hold ourselves and one another.

Granted, right now no such standard exists. I don't think that will always be true; if we don't regulate our own behavior then someone will certainly do so for us. I think it'd be a good idea if we had a say in how it happens, and when we have people apparently arguing that no one should expect anyone to hold us to any standard, it's very hard for me even to imagine an argument in support of the idea that we deserve one.

I'd also like to think that, by being in this industry, we're not all in the position of an RJR or Philip Morris employee trying to believe we aren't really peddling addiction and cancer. Whether that sort of thing bothers anyone else, it's not up to me to decide, though I think it should. It does bother me.

This is exactly it, and it's also why it's so frustrating when straight friends introduce you to others as "gay". It's like, hey that's my business to say so and not yours.

>> Why openly disclose your sexual preference/orientation so eagerly on hacker news comments, then?

Really? I shouldn't have to explain this, but that it's my choice makes all the difference?

Furthermore, if you'd read my comment - it said that I myself am not concerned with disclosing my orientation/gender online - but I am deathly concerned for my fellow queer folk for whom that is not the case.

If I say stealing a car is "criminal to the utmost degree" would you say "I'm sorry, but categorizing theft of property as criminal really dilutes the severity of real criminal violations that have actually happened"?

I ask this because "human rights" is a wide and varied collection of thoughts and ideas ranging from the right to not be sexually assaulted to the right to not have businesses you interact with sell data about your sexual behaviors.

My point is, the whole conversation is subjective. You're both wrong in the eyes of some people and completely reasonable and correct in the eyes of others. Just some helpful framing you might want to use before "whatabouting" when people's lives may literally be on the line for this information being disseminated in their home countries.

From the safety of my home in an exceedingly liberal state in the US, working for an employer with a decent track record for inclusivity, I would be Big Mad if my grindr data was sold. From Chechnya, I would be terrified for my safety, physically as well as at a job, in the same situation.

TL;dr- When people stop being hate-crimed or state-santioned-murdered for being gay, the community will stop "overreacting" to people outing us against our wishes.

> If I say stealing a car is "criminal to the utmost degree" would you say "I'm sorry, but categorizing theft of property as criminal really dilutes the severity of real criminal violations that have actually happened"?

And I'm pretty sure that if we follow the argument to absurdity, all of us should only be talking about a single incident at a time. The worst one, that renders the rest not only irrelevant but disrespectful and insulting to the real victim.

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