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Comment by timrice | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I am very aware of all the potential dangers, which contributes to my blocking everything in the first place. I am curious if, in the United States, there are any realized dangers to these privacy violations.

The Udemy thing is interesting, but it's also (as far as I can tell) just doing stuff with first party cookies and region lookups. Nothing at all the level of sophistication that is being observed from Meta or Tiktok.

I'd love to hear stories of people who got screwed because of facebook or Google's broad web of surveillance, but as near as I can tell, nobody is actually being harmed.

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Google and Facebook coin it as violation of their terms. Just watch HN and you will get the next story every other month.

But the most chilling quote is "we kill people based on metadata":

As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has said, “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.” When I quoted Baker at a recent debate at Johns Hopkins University, my opponent, General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker’s comment “absolutely correct,” and raised him one, asserting, “We kill people based on metadata.”

I'm not entirely sure what you're hinting at. Are you saying that the US military and intelligence agencies use metadata to track down and kill people that they deem as enemies? And that Meta/Google/etc. are in cahoots with them to do this?

Can you link me example of this happening? Is there credible evidence that an ordinary citizen (like myself) is in more danger from state actors because of the information harvesting that large corporations engage in? I feel like if the government wants to track down and kill me they already have my address, cell phone records, etc. No need to contact Meta or Tiktok.

You write this as if this wasn't common knowledge: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosu...

If they had no need for contacting Meta and Microsoft and Google, why did they do so?

How could would this put an ordinary citizen at risk? I don't know. All the data is run through an AI and if it labels you terrorist, who is to question it?

They sure kill a lot of people in Pakistan based on this data:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n...

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