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Comment by redmand | Hacker News Reader

I have to sadly agree. An earlier article talking about the erosion of privacy was met with more "what's the big deal" commenting than I am comfortable with in an environment such as HN. For me, it illustrated a direction in technology workers' attitudes that is frightening. I expected better.

People -- and I will call out my fellow Americans in this -- don't seem to really care until it directly affects them and in significantly adverse ways. Up until that point, the attitude seems to be "I can still get by" and by the time that's not true, it's generations too late. But, hey, as long as you got yours, why should you care about your neighbor, right?

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I've seen too many people complaining how annoying dealing with GDPR is and how it is not government's business to regulate that.

Well, if you don't exactly this happens. But somehow when there is minuscule effort required to keep your freedoms there are always a plenty of people wanting to throw it away instead.

TLDR: "Others have a different opinion than me so I'm going to decide their motivations for them and attack them instead of defending my opinion".

They don't have a different opinion. They have the null position of "who cares?".

The people being referred to in the above comment aren't people who have thought in any depth about the issue of privacy and the boundaries that should be put in place to prevent abuse of violation of individual privacy and come to a contrary opinion. It's about people who are so completely heads down in their tiny vision of work and life that they've never really thought about the issue and only see things like "individual right to privacy" as annoying roadblocks they have to deal with to do what they're paid to do.

The annoyance and frustration is with the apathy towards and issue, not with contradictory opinions.

People don't study history and so we're doomed to repeat it. The reason why the Nazi holocaust of jews was most effective in the Netherlands is because of how incredible that country's record keeping was. You could argue that the violation of privacy might not be terribly abused today, but the people in charge today won't be in charge forever.

Choosing to do nothing is also a choice.

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