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Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

> we can just refuse to buy Fords.

I'm trying to think back to a situation where a product was shipped with something intrusive like this and customers didn't buy it. Can you help?

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> trying to think back to a situation where a product was shipped with something intrusive like this and customers didn't buy it

There aren’t many because most consumers don’t particularly value privacy. They presumably wouldn’t mind this. It’s only a problem for us if there is no choice in the market, or their choices have a negative externality on us.

Do you think we might see the same sort of bifurcation in the car market that we’ve seen in many other markets, as peoples’ wealth has gone more bimodal? Really cheaply made/total junk with relatively little variation, and premium priced, small volume goods marketed to the upper middle and above.

Isn’t that what we’ve seen for like 100 years? There’s Kia and Lexus and all sorts of stuff in between.

haves vs have-nots

working class or owning class

it really does seem like it’s going that direction, doesn’t it?

I think Google Glass and Facebook’s camera sunglasses didn’t work out over privacy concerns. Or maybe they didn’t work out because they were useless, IDK. In general, I think it is hard to think, especially off the cuff, of examples of products that didn’t work out.

IMO these glasses did not work out because of privacy concerns or lack of usefulness, but rather because many felt “dorky” and attracted unwanted attention when wearing them.

The devices I listed slightly miss the mark, they aren’t exactly what the first comment was about (products that violate the purchaser’s privacy be products that violate the privacy of everyone that happens to be around them).

Still though, I think this is part of how the general public experiences privacy violations. Not from some opsec or cryptography point of view. But because privacy violation devices are dorky and attract unwanted attention. They are dorky, because cool, fun things are often illegal or at least you don’t want them recorded and posted to Facebook for your extended family and employers to see. They attract unwanted attention because nobody wants that.

Your smartphone

Anything by meta

Amazon Alexa/dot

All smart-tvs are uploading your screen and what you watch constantly. Source: I worked on adding interactivity to ads on certain TVs when they used content recognition on your sceeen caps

I'm confused, those are wildly successful products bought by millions of customers.

He said DIDN'T buy it.

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