Ask HN: I'm not motivated enough to take privacy seriously

I see all this posts about Google (with it's massive services), Twitter, Instagram, [any other sites], collecting data and building a profile of you to serve you personalised ads and maybe other stuff. I understand that. But, apparently not enough! as I can't seem to leave the convenience of it. Maybe it's because it isn't tangible?; as in I can't visualise how all this will affect my day to day life, so I always give in to the comfort. Can you please convince me otherwise?

Maybe it won't affect you, but it might affect your parents, your siblings, your children.

An easy scenario I can think of is extortion.

It is complex.

Personally I am not so afraid of the NSA; I know the people there have some ethics and internal controls. Do I trust them completely? No. But they are one of many threats.

France, Iran, Israel, Russia, and the U.K. are just a few of countries other than the U.S. that run assassination, spycraft, 'terrorism' and other sneaky pete operations worldwide.

They are threats, and so are many criminal organizations, individuals, etc. The chief danger of the NSA is that they could be hiding a set of master keys for a national encryption standard which could be stolen by a person who, like Edward Snowden, breaches internal controls and then who knows what happens...

On top of all those spooks (maybe 30% psychopaths) you have the people who want to steal everything that isn't tied down (maybe 60% psychopaths), and the people who face insane pressures to put up numbers for investors every quarter (90% psychopaths).

There is the real and imagined threats of J. Edgar Hoover style dossiers, but also privacy as a "right to be left alone" which could mean that no you don't want to get certain solicitors showing up at your door or to be followed around by shoes everywhere you go. (Just knowing you are being watched is intimidating, I am going through that right now with a Siamese cat that thinks it is better than other cats and will chase them away by staring at them.)

Then there is medical privacy, genetic privacy and a bunch of issues that revolve around that. For instance you have these people who get a $100 DNA test and find out that they are one of 200 people who have the same sperm donor father.

And of course there is a trade-off between public and private interests.

The "right to be forgotten" is controversial because it is frequently invoked by embezzlers, con artists and other white-collar criminals who many of us fear will offend again if they get the opportunity. The NSA can say that cryptoanalytic warfare has helped us sink Nazi subs, find Che Guevara, etc. Credit Bureaus enable you to do business with people you don't know over the phone and not be deathly afraid of getting stiffed.

So it is a lot to think about.

The thing is, it probably won't affect your life. There's millions of people willingly giving up their information to the internet, and it's not like every single one of them, or even a majority, will face any consequences.

But what if you suddenly decided to change the world and become a politician? Well, I sure hope you never directly googled for some particular genre of pornography, specially if it's something that's widely frowned upon.

And that's just one example. The thing is, if Google, Facebook, etc. ever want something from you, they probably have the power to destroy your life if you don't give it to them.

Do you really trust each and every tech company with access to your data that they won't ever use it to cause you some sort of harm?

And what about governments? No, I am not talking about your fancy democratic government, I'm sure others will point out what's wrong with that assumption. I'm talking about those "russian hackers" the USA is so confused about.

Chances are, google knows enough about you to piece together who you're likely to vote for. What if they start targetting you with ads meant to mobilize voters, because they know you're likely to vote the "right" party? Or what if they bombard you with stories about how democracy is broken anyway, and elections are manipulated, because they think you might vote for the "wrong" party?

"But google would never do that" I hear you say... "And if they did, I wouldn't fall for it"

If you knew about it you wouldn't, but you wouldn't know. These things do work, otherwise google wouldn't be so filthy rich with their dozens of products that they run at a deficit for years. Ads work. Online manipulation works.

What does that have to do with the "russian hackers" I mentioned above? Well, what do hackers usually do? Right, they hack. What if google gets hacked? Suddenly another nations government has access to millions of (insert your country)s citizens to manipulate.

"But google won't get hacked, and neither would facebook"

Sure, I won't hack either of them and neither will you. But we're not the Chinese government, with as much money to throw at a room of programmers as it takes for them to make it happen.

And what about third party contractors? They may not have the same security standards or resources to protect your data.

I could go on and on about this, but I'll leave that for others.

In conclusion: Privacy does matter maybe in the same way climate change does. It's not like driving your car for an hour will make it one degree hotter all of a sudden. It's a complex process that nobody fully understands and that's very hard to grasp, yet everybody who spends time researching the subject certainly agrees that there is great importance in it and it does affect all of humanity on a scale beyond what we see in our day to day lives.

EDIT:

Why did I even bother writing all of that? Just read [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi) and you should get an idea of why you should value complete and unconditional privacy.

> The NSA can say that cryptoanalytic warfare has helped us sink Nazi subs, find Che Guevara, etc.

Guns have helped the allies defeat the Nazis. Bombing civilian targets to break morale did the same. I'm sure torture was also used here and there to get Hans to tell them where the gestapo hides their sauerkraut.

My point is, bad stuff can be used for good. That doesn't make it right, and even less does it mean we should allow others to use that same bad stuff with bad intentions.