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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

There are exceptions, but for the most part, I'm not sure that knowing specifically what I was doing five years ago has much value to me or anyone else?

I was probably sitting in front of a computer.

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You are not always the target, but leaking data like this empowers those that may use it against someone else. I mean to say, you are providing training data. People who move-like-this-at-these-times also have these other tendencies... It's like fusion sensing.

Same with secure messaging. You might not care that [insert boogeyman here] know what you're doing all day, but people you interact with may be harmed by you being leaky.

Anyway, the whole point is your lack of imagination is not a good reason to embrace surveillance. Rejecting surveillance on principal slows down our descent into a panopticonical hellscape.

Firstly, I looked up panopticon, and it does indeed seem like that is how modern societies are being structured now, and secondly... It is true that people generally seem to display a lack of imagination regarding all of this. The whole "ive got nothing to hide so what do i care if they surveil me" attitude comes across as selfish and naive in this light.

I wonder what ad-tech or whatever org would do if we got to a state where they just couldnt track or id people. Would we still have free entertainment on the net? would the net even still be mainstream?

My point was more that this data loses its value fast. I'd worry more about it knowing where I was recently.

If only activists and journalists hide, while everybody else provides all data to the government/Facebook, then it becomes easy to track them.

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