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Comment by zo1 | Hacker News Reader

I would - and I'm sure a lot of other people.

Are you genuinely curious, or are you asking because you're implying that the people who would use such an app are somehow not understanding something or not intelligent, or don't know something that you do? Like you have to prove your case too, as you're not immediately "right" in your statement. Sure there is some level of "risk" in doing this, but there is risk in a lot of things. It's like me asking people this:

"Why would anyone trust people with 4 weeks driving classes and a test with their lives on a road driving 80mph inside 2-tonne metal cages? Seems insane."

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> "Why would anyone trust people with 4 weeks driving classes and a test with their lives on a road driving 80mph inside 2-tonne metal cages? Seems insane."

We've run the experiment for n decades with billions of subjects and the results indicate it is actually not that bad.

We have -not- really even discussed, much consider, the implications of having a central system with machine intelligence designed to extract features, patterns, emotions, assumed motives, ..., having access to the entire digital lives of societies.

Is it insane to repeat the same mistakes? Not sure but it's somewhere close in the neighborhood. We could run it by a k-nearest algorithm and see what that suggests as a better category than 'insane'.

> We have -not- really even discussed, much consider, the implications of having a central system with machine intelligence designed to extract features, patterns, emotions, assumed motives, ..., having access to the entire digital lives of societies.

Actually we've pretty much been watching that play out for years now, even if the technology hasn't been in its final form for the duration. Results have already been a wee bit society-destroying.

You seem to be willfully ignoring the point.

There is no business model here that doesn't include "We sell your most private and sensitive data to the highest bidder". Because it's free, they can't make money any other way. And while for other browser extensions/software, you can at least audit the requests being made by the extension, this thing is sending away all your data because it has to in order to work.

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