People don't really care about privacy, it's as simple as that. Yes, they worry about privacy, and complain about violations of privacy. But if they cared, they never would have purchased this product in the first place. There are bits of technology which violate privacy, but are extremely difficult to fully avoid: Social Media, (I know a lot of HN isn't on it, but how about most of your family and friends?) smart phones, the surveillance of modern stores, etc. All of those are terrifically difficult to fully avoid or mitigate. But not buying an echo is effortless and free. There's no cost associated with not buying one, and not spending the time to set it up.
But, despite the fact that it literally costs nothing, these have sold quite well, and if folks haven't got an echo they've got a Google Home, or a Siri, or something else. They just don't care about privacy, and companies know this.
This argument, "People don't really care about <x> ...", is not so much an argument as it is a rationalization for amoral or simply bad behavior on the part of the seller/supplier.
It is the rationale for the existence of regulation by government. The person who is in a position to protect the interests of the customer, whether or not the customer 'cares', has a moral obligation to take care.
When the supplier chooses not to protect the interests of their customers, regulation steps in to create a consequence for that bad behavior.
I know people who hate this reality because they feel it is up to the customer to "decide" whether the risk is worth it, but those same people are not moving to Somalia to live in a land with zero effective government and regulation either. It generally comes down to a discussion that "some regulation" is good except for the regulation that is interfering with "their" plans. A very self centered point of view but all too common in my experience.
> This argument, "People don't really care about <x> ...", is not so much an argument as it is a rationalization for amoral or simply bad behavior on the part of the seller/supplier.
It's worse than that. It's adversarial propaganda.
People actually do care about privacy, but they also care about other things, and they don't always know about privacy.
If Amazon tells you that they're recording what you say at all, it's buried in a hundred page ToS that nobody reads, and then what they do with the information isn't even clearly specified. If people understood that they're using it to determine which products to show you so you're more likely to buy the ones with higher margins, and that's costing you $1200/year, people would care about that, but they don't even realize it's happening.
If the market is consolidated into two companies and they're both invading your privacy, or there is one company that doesn't but their product costs $500 more and the customer doesn't have $500 more, it's not that customers don't care, it's that they have no viable alternatives.
If they start using a product before it starts invading their privacy and then later it does, but that product is something like Microsoft Windows and by then they're so thoroughly locked into that platform that short-term extrication is infeasible, they grit their teeth and whinge about it because they wish there was an alternative, not because they don't.
Casting this as "people don't care" gets it wrong. If there are two otherwise-identical fungible products and one of them invades your privacy and the other one doesn't, not doing that is an advertisable feature. In a competitive market it's a competitive advantage. But if the incumbents can convince would-be competitors that it isn't then they don't have to face that competition, which is the purpose of the propaganda.
And in the markets where competition is lacking independently of this, the "regulation" needed is antitrust, because uncompetitive markets have more than just privacy problems.
>This argument, "People don't really care about <x> ...",
That may definitely be the case sometimes, but I certainly don't mean it like that. By normal person standards, I'm pretty extreme about privacy: no social media, (no, HN doesn't count) pihole, ublock+custom lists, noscript, as few services as possible, frozen credit, DNS resolver rather than a single 3rd party service, etc.
I strongly lament the lack of interest in privacy. The point of my statement is that people can't even be bothered to care about privacy when it costs them nothing. Given this, I can't imagine them actually caring about privacy when it actually inconveniences them. There's just no chance of it. I don't want things to be that way, but it's clear there's nothing I can do about it.
Between pornography ID laws, anti-bot mitigations on websites, and the rise of smart phones + apps, it seems pretty clear that the death of privacy on the internet is just around the corner. And people will welcome it. I'm not happy about this, and may be less happy about it than much of HN. But I think it's pretty inevitable.
"People are naturally ambivalent" is a statement of fact, not an argument. What confuses me is that you imply that you agree it's true. After all, if people did care they wouldn't need advocates to care for them.
What's more, we don't want to care about things. In fact a lot of pain we are experiencing now is precisely that we are being forced to care about things we haven't had to for decades, arguably centuries. It sucks. Life is better when the plumbing "just works" precisely because then we don't have to care about it and can focus on other more interesting parts of life.
There has been a critical breakdown in the trust people have in the experts that advocate for them. The damage started with a flurry of self-inflicted wounds and then those wounds were mercilessly exploited by those seeking tactical advantage. What makes this especially evil is that these mercinaries use people's natural ambivalence to damage the very institutions that made their ambivalence possible! They are tricking people into acting against their self-interest.
The real solution is neither to defend damaged institutions nor to seek their utter destruction. The solution is to heal those wounds and take strong action to avoid future damage. That's the only way people can go on not caring so they can focus on more important things.
> It is the rationale for the existence of regulation by government
... including the War on Drugs. We should be very cautious about asserting our value system over the value system of other people who are customers of these tools, lest the end result is a situation where people are no happier (and not much safer).
People don't care about anything by default. They have to learn about threat-models and how to mitigate those threats. Usually this only happens after getting burned personally. (To learn from others is still learning, which people also don't care about.)
This topic comes up in politics all the time. There is this hurt and offended reaction to people embracing authoritarianism, often becoming nihilistic. But the practical truth is that people don't care about philosophy or politics. Human society's default is authoritarianism. Rather than be upset at this impulse, it would be wiser to acknowledge with amazement that we managed to try something different. Civilization will struggle with it's default settings for as long as civilization exists, and our role is fight against them, knowing the fight is never over.
I'd say it's quite the opposite. It takes a lot of force and coercion to maintain authoritarian institutions precisely because it's not natural. Most of us have had a lifetime of schools, churches, and jobs drilling conformity and blind obedience into us.
Human society's default organizing principle is authoritarianism. This is born out by the fact that most humans who've ever lived lived under such a system. A large fraction of us today live under such a system. Even in liberal societies our entertainment overflows with depictions of monarchy and feudalism. Even at a smaller scale, families, clans, businesses, militaries and teams are run this way: there is one boss, and all authority flows from them.
For some (for me) there is a psychological allure to the idea that left to our own devices we'd self-organize in an enlightened way. But the experiment has been done over and over and over again, and that's not what happens. I realize it's painful to accept something you don't want to be true, but that's no reason not to face up to it. Better to face the challenge open-eyed than to have false assumptions undermine you.
A columnist I read brought this up recently mocking a bunch of Silicon Valley execs supporting monarchism, presumably thinking they would be the educated elite monarchs. His point was that they hadn't invented anything new . . . monarchy is literally one of the oldest ideas in human history.
Of course there's also the bit that historically, when unrest or a revolution comes, the people who think they can manipulate it to end up in charge are usually the people who end up getting stood up against a wall and shot, too.
Some people have enjoyed the benefits of government agencies that promote consumer protections. At some level, maybe we hear about or even directly benefitted from some consumer protection agency, and assume the government has our back. Maybe it is naive, but I still think that assumption is there: we don't have to care because it is someone else's job to care about privacy. How could it be put on sale if it is not safe? They test cars, for safety, they test food for safety, etc. They must test these things, too, right?
This is clearly not the case, though. The government works for big tech. The US government is even shutting down consumer protection agencies at the behest of big tech and leaving us to their whims!
> This kind of apathic statement is not very useful.
Except for corporations who want to exploit us to no end. I’m sure they love this type of defeatist attitude. There’s no one easier to take advantage of than someone who confirms they have given up and won’t fight back.
People should care about climate change, that's different from whether people do care about it.
More importantly though, those that do care should do as much as they're willing to do to help avoid making it worse.
For some that means choosing to only buy products made with natural materials, growing/raising their own food, drinking rain water, etc. For others that means not using plastic straws.
There's no perfect answer and no one really knows what will happen in the future or how to best change it. Regulators fall into this camp too, they don't know the future and they can't accurately predict precisely what must be don't. Expecting this of them is a fools errand and demanding everyone do what they say is oppressive at best.
Blaming consumers for climate change is a con. Giving regular people a bunch of useless busywork when they are already busy instead of regulating at the manufacturer where the effort would be minimal is a choice.
It will always work. The opportunity to blame your neighbor for climate change for not being as conscientious as you is the archetype of a liberal wedge issue. You can yell at them on social media. But regulate my company? Akshualy you're killing jobs?
I'm not blaming anyone. People make their choices, every choice has a consequence. Its as simple as that.
It sounds like you may take more issue with the busy work we're all given. Is the problem really that the government isn't regulating problems away, or that people are kept so busy and distracted that they can't make their own decisions?
Asking everybody nicely to stop contributing to climate change does not work to stop climate change. It is an individualized solution to a societal problem.
We didn't clean up our water by asking people to stop buying lightbulbs from the factory that dumped mercury directly into the river - we made it illegal for the company to do so, and we were successful.
I'm also not proposing we ask people nicely to do anything. People will make their choices, we have to expect people will generally make a decision that's best for them and that in the long run if people continue to do what they think is best it will work out.
What are we even doing here with capitalism, democracy, etc if we don't generally trust people to make their own decisions?
With regards specifically to lightbulb factories dumping mercury - the problem is often that the people in the area have no power to legally handle it themselves. Companies get to hide behind expensive lawyers, lobbyists, and often regulations themselves to avoid repercussions.
We often can get just as far by removing legal protections for companies rather than further centralizing power and authority to a few people we trust to do the right thing.
> What are we even doing here with capitalism, democracy, etc if we don't generally trust people to make their own decisions?
Laws are the primary mechanism by which democracy safeguards threatened community resources. You may be longing for an anarcho-capitalist society, but don't expect negative externalities to ever be priced in.
I'm not an anarcho-capitalist, or an anarchist in general. I generally agree with laws that protect individual freedoms and generally disagree with laws that limit freedoms. Protecting everyone's right to free speech is important for example, legislating whether my milk must be pasteurized is not for example.
People might not care, but it also might be that they are not aware. Telemetry and data collection are cleverly hidden by app developers. Imagine if for example a phone would show messages like "Sending your data to Company X" every time it sends a telemetry. That would make people more aware.
What I think is hard for a lot of tech people to understand is that people don't care about privacy in the abstract. "Your data is being read and stored" isn't interesting to most people unless they know what it's being used for. And, often, to the surprise of the kind of person reading this, they are totally fine with how their data is being used. They don't care that the government is listening in for anti-terror activities. They don't care that corporations are aggregating their data to sell ads. They don't think it's a big deal.
There are things they would care about, but they don't care about those things.
And they don't care about privacy in the abstract.
They really do. Do you have anything other than a blind assertion to back this up?
> they worry about privacy, and complain about violations of privacy
Yea, so, looks like they do care.
> they never would have purchased this product in the first place
They were lied to, baited in, and the terms switched. Your assertion is ridiculous and one sided.
> Social Media,
I'm sharing things with my friends not with corporations.
> All of those are terrifically difficult to fully avoid or mitigate
Two browser plugins mitigate it entirely.
> They just don't care about privacy, and companies know this.
They're not sophisticated enough to understand the landscape around them and assume the laws are actually being enforced. What a corrupt position you have taken here.
> They really do. Do you have anything other than a blind assertion to back this up?
Continued human behavior online. The actual behavior of users does not suggest they consider, on average, that their privacy is being violated every time they put more data into Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.
If you want to use this as a case study, come back to this topic in a year and see if Alexa sales and / or usage has gone down or up. It's at about 600 million installed units and 77 million users right now (and that's after someone's Alexa dataset was used as evidence in their murder trial two years ago... If people cared, wouldn't the line go down, not up?).
Per my longer post above, people do care about privacy, in the EU and other jurisdictions; it's the US where they tend not to. Stop generalizing about what "humans" and "people" or "laws" do; start talking by country or region. Americans do one thing, Europeans another.
And as I pointed out there are not 600 million active installed Alexas, noone (outside Amazon and LE) knows the number of active current Alexas or current households with 1+ active Alexa. A better way to estimate usage is look at usercounts for the top-100 most popular apps, by geo.
UPDATE: I found the "77.2 million (Alexa) users globally" stat from [0] citing [1]
Right. People do care about privacy, in the EU and other jurisdictions; it's the US where users tend not to. It's better for everyone in this thread to simply stop generalizing about what "humans" and "people" or "laws" do; start talking by country or region or privacy regime. (Whether the laws are flouted is entirey another topic.)
As to smart-assistant usage, what we would really want to see is comparative numbers of current and new Alexa users, broken out by privacy region (US, EU, other Europe, Australia, Asia, ME, CALA, Africa).
(PS noone other than Amazon knows how many "active Alexa users" there are in a geo, since no third-party can audit Amazon's numbers, and "installed units" might simply mean "user bought an Alexa device at any pointsince 2014, it might be unused/disconnected/broken/sitting in a pile of junk/given away years ago. This is just like the games Linux vendors, Java and MSFT notoriously played with "licenses installed" even if that machine was wiped to install another OS, without ever activating the shipped OS).
"Amazon has sold more than 500 million Alexa-enabled devices" absolutely does not mean "there were at any point 500 million active Alexa users", and anyway most Alexa users have multiple devices in one house, so the theoretical peak devicecount was only ever 500m/n at most. I suspect the real peak was closer to 77m than 500m. But noone outside Amazon knows; there are only estimates. There is no Nielsen Research or Quantcast of Alexa devices, AFAIK. There are only the "77.2 million (Alexa) users globally" stat for number of users [0][1]. Not devicecount.
And as to whether privacy laws, warrant requests are being disregarded, blanket geofenced warrants, Ring syndication, yRoombas snooping on you, data fusion of that data with Kindle devices/phones and smart TV etc., it's a semantic debate whether that's "widespread privacy violations which US Congress is lobbied to turn a blind eye to" rather than "users aren't sophisticated enough to detect when laws are being violated". Imagine if we applied that thought process to bank robberies and whether they were adequately protecting your money: the onus being on the customer to constantly monitor your bank. (We don't need to because there are consumer and criminal laws governing banking).
Anyone with more time might care to look for estimates of number of households with active Alexas by geo/privacy region, and compare to privacy watchdog reports.
> People don't really care about privacy, it's as simple as that. Yes, they worry about privacy, and complain about violations of privacy.
Your second sentences proves that the first is a lie. People very clearly care about their privacy. These surveillance systems are designed so that users never see the line between the collection of their private data and the consequences. People are upset when they know that their privacy has been violated, but Amazon tells them that they are safe and they never see the contractor working for Amazon listening to them having sex so they don't have the sense of outrage that they should.
Amazon is exploiting well known and researched limitations of human's brain/perception and they've crafted their marketing to be as manipulative and reassuring as possible to keep people bugging their own homes with their devices. It's a little unfair to blame the public being fleeced and not the multi-billion dollar corporation who has devoted unimaginable resources into manipulating the customers they are screwing over. You and I know better than to fall for their bullshit, but it's easy to see how most will struggle.
Then why are they willing to pay a premium for Apple Products, which do as much locally as possible? (Without going into detail, I know this because a very skilled engineer I worked with was hired by them.)
Also, even if "people" don't care (I'd love to see a peer reviewed study on the # of folks who meet this criteria you claim), why should the preference of those people override those of us who DO want privacy? Why can't the few who don't care opt in to the panopticon?
We obsess over "AI" when things like "take an audio file and produce a written transcription" have been being done for quite some time. Where does the algorithm end and "AI" begin, and what is it about "AI" that necessitates throwing away years of existing work on privacy preserving queries?
Yeah, people care about privacy, and a lot of other things, but generally lack the organization and resources to do much.
Privacy is also one of those things that is much easier to care about if the lack of privacy is highly visible (e.g. someone standing in your window), but tech companies are pretty good about keeping their snooping in the background.
Nobody buys apple because of privacy they buy it because its a status symbol and stupidly easy to use. All the privacy marketing is there just to feel even more superior to those plebian android user that can have a factually and verifiably private OS with android forks like GrapehenOS for people who actually care.
Majority user care about privacy the same way they care about the environment with apples greenwashing. One marketing line is sufficient.
>Nobody buys apple because of privacy they buy it because its a status symbol and stupidly easy to use.
I had a friend who used to joke "Linux is free if your time has no value" -- when I went off to college I settled on a Macbook because it had a CLI paired with actual hardware/software support.
I keep my phone as long as it gets security updates -- despite talk about price, I've found I can hold onto an Apple laptop for at least four years as long as I make sure to go heavy on the ram when I buy initially buy it.
Also I'm confused how you can jump from legit crits of Apple's closed source to indicating a preference for Android, an OS that will beam a great deal of telemetry to GOOG.
I tend to treat my phone as an inherent privacy risk and lock down my laptop -- it's my understanding that at the end of the day the LTE stack is gonna be closed even on a pine phone.
"They just don't care about privacy, and companies know this."
They don't prioritize privacy over other concerns, largely convenience, because (to date) they haven't been burned by that choice or at least haven't been burned badly enough or aren't aware. I think that, in the coming months and years, this is going to change.
My family has started paying attention to this sort of thing and opting out of things that they see as risks to privacy. A few years ago they were like "yeah, you're right, but..." -- not so much anymore.
People (including me) are simply ignorant of the privacy implications of their actions, even tech savvy people like me can't really understand who is watching and collecting their data and when, and won't go to extreme lengths in preventing others from listening in.
Regular folks are even less aware and are scared by technology - when a scary popup comes up, they will press anything and agree to anything just to make it go away.
>People don't really care about privacy, it's as simple as that.
A big reason for this is that no one really explains what happens and why people should care.
Typically, it's either a hand-wave to "this should be important, you should care", or steeped in so much technical detail that the non-technical listener has a hard time wrapping their head around it. (The third way it's explained is via a bunch of conspiracy theory/NSA stuff, which probably just turns most people off entirely).
Worse, people have been in a dozen breaches in the last few years, but the majority haven't suffered a personal impact (yet). Further reinforcing "why should I care?".
Yes, but "social media" is a broad spectrum. On one end you have "profile-less" social media, like forums, and the other end is "profile-rich" social media, like Facebook. The privacy implications of the latter are far worse than the former.
The test for me in defining social medial is whether its core is based a graph of connections. This is where you lose control in, for example, FB: Meta can infer many details about me without me ever posting anything, such as figuring out my home town based on relatives and school friends -- many other examples.
And this is why I no longer use any Meta products.
What I can do is help my family and friends understand the choices they are making (e.g. use Signal to talk to me). That rush they feel posting something has effects on people in their graph and now they at least understand that and pause.
Another example is ancestor "research" type sites, or DNA tests to find "your true ancestry". I had no choice a cousin of mine chose that as a hobby.
Only if you think forums, 4chan or whatnot from ye olden days are also "social media". HN has no friends feature, no curated algorithm, no way to discover creators...
I do. Primeval social media, sure. Social media that predates the term "social media," even. Nearly all things exist before we agree on a name for them, so that's nothing new.
All of those services you list are examples of an online medium that exists for the purpose of socializing. So yes, they're all forms of social media, even if they're considerably less structurally harmful than something like Facebook.
HN only violates your privacy if you write your personal details into comments. Facebook violates your privacy in ways that only talented engineers can understand.
It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that consumerism is a stronger force than that care. Which makes sense, consumerism is the backbone of every consumer-focused capitalist economy.
Our greatest power is literally not buying things. But people don’t do it in practice. Why is complicated. We are constantly bombarded by propaganda to push us to consumerist behavior. We just don’t call it that, it’s “advertisement”.
Many people refuse to have any of these devices in their home over privacy concerns, one person I know wants them unplugged when visiting. I like the convenience, but there is a line and Amazon is crossing it. The lack of innovation, layoffs, and reports of financial losses were the warning the enshittifcation of Alexa is coming and I expect this is only the start.
Alexa and Google Assistant created the market, now it will be interesting to see how it evolves. Home Assistant is working well in testing and has a great feature set for home automation, the LLM support is fun, and most of the smart devices I've bought over the years are compatible including Apple Homekit. At least for people that do care, there are options.
Cynically, much of the "privacy" industry is just a red herring by big tech / data broker industry to normalize how egregious their privacy violations are.
But, despite the fact that it literally costs nothing, these have sold quite well, and if folks haven't got an echo they've got a Google Home, or a Siri, or something else. They just don't care about privacy, and companies know this.