Hacker News Reader

Almost nobody lives like this. Anyone that does is giving up on modern society. It shouldn't be an exclusive or. You should be able to have privacy and be part of society

View on HN

It's not a question of should or not. People just willingly give up privacy for convenience. For example merely using a phone (not to mention a smartphone with their location awareness capabilities, or a plain mobile phone with their multilateration, any one that works at all, even a landline if you use it at that very moment) is a breach of privacy. But you need it to function in a modern society. You can avoid such things by taking some extra steps but each of those steps takes progressively more effort and bites a huge chuck of the aforementioned convenience, not only for you but also for the other side of your social interaction.

The whole original topic is more about prevalent abuses of authority than privacy itself, though. And that's a different thing because protecting your privacy from authorized and/or dedicated actors is always quite difficult, if possible at all, even with a proper privacy "hygiene", and needs a totally different approach.

I know I'm in the minority, but still, I didn't give up my privacy for "convenience". I bought my first phone because my employer required a way to contact me. Not to mention all the ways pretty much every single job nowadays requires much more invasions of privacy than just a phone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com