I’ve tried and failed more often than not. Most of the time the very subject matter is so “boring” that I never get very far. I’m not sure what to do either, most people don’t see the problem and find the topic too obscure to inform themselves.

It takes a special mind to delve into such topics. This will and has been the case.

Those that understands it becomes responsible to inform other of which settings they should have. While not needing to explaining why. That should apply to most (scientists, networking, philosophy).

I think the above mindset at least helps me out to really dumb it down/skip to the real effects when speaking to others. Well, I try ;) But there's always a shimmer of hope that someone will pick something up and go deeper, but that does not happen regularly.

So what to do? Start an online group with people with the same focus and do the battle. Nobody else will care until it's changed and it starts to affect their daily life.

The issue with that is that it's not "your" data. Not because you owe it to the internet companies, or because you give it to the government, which then uses it both for commercial purposes and directly against you (pervasive in China).

Your data is not yours because you aren't unique enough to have unique data. So there are tens of thousands of humans alive that are essentially direct copies of you, at least in terms of behavior. They might have a different address, but they can be influenced in exactly the same way.

So this is not a battle that can be won.

What you say only applies to DNA.

Other types of data sets might not be globally unique, but that's also an irrelevant point if one can't be bucketed to one or more sets. And without pervasive, unregulated tracking, which is the very point of this article, it can't.

You're also too quick to declare winners. This pervasive surveillance is pretty new, society and government move slowly and it seems that our societies are starting to better understand how this new form of exploitation works. TFA is actually a cristal clear expositions of the clear disadvantages of data collection.

We still get people on HN crying "how does this affect me?" as a pro surveillance argument and the article puts that question to rest.

Depends on what you mean by won. Is your data used to make you a better consumer or prosumer?

Is data collected without your knowledge actually useful? Twitter data jumps to mind, a lot of junk.

Meaning that keeping data away from people who would use it for their own purposes, from selling you something to impounding your car if you're behind on payments cannot realistically be accompolished.

For each use, judge for yourself if that's good or bad, effective or ineffective, but the purpose doesn't change whether the data is available or not.

Bad data is bad data. It's true it gets averaged out due to the masses. Still it does provide a somewhat accurate picture, but has a degree of error.

Best means I can argue this are colleagues in plant life and marine biology using the same tools are still attempting to get concrete predictive data for the environment. It's simply not there yet.

Nope. What I'm saying is that YOU're average (and me, and everyone). Which means that given a few facts about you, the rest can be correctly inferred. Which means that you cannot prevent systems from inferring how you can, say, be induced to buy something, because you cannot keep those few trivial facts it needs for that from the system.

I keep getting ads for things I do not want to buy due to the average. For example a championship belt that recently has a tacked on women in my feed. By no means is that something that interests me but can understand the average may be tempted.

In regards to the younger generations I definitely understand the fear. But we get bored as a species, otherwise networks would never of gone down the outrage path of targeted ads had an absolute effect. And even then more and more people are setting aside their smart phones and jumping off of social media or just using it for the bare minimum.

What you are arguing is happening, but whether or not we are truly on the last leg of the data argument is not true. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States

That just means the algorithms don't work well enough or don't have enough data yet. Also there's a little bit of bad incentives here: these companies also get paid for showing you something at all.

Because everything is fine. The big conceit from privacy advocates is they think people don't know their data is being collected and used, but the reality is, they do know. They just don't care.

Show me a concrete negative impact on my life as a result of the passive data collection perpetrated by Google, Facebook, et. al., and you might change my mind, depending on how negative it is.

I get a lot out of the products I pay for with my data. It feels like a bargain, honestly.

You believe this is all about you, when in fact it's about our societies and vulnerable categories of people (mostly the poor, and various religious, political, ethnic, etc minorities).

You're basically declaring at first they came for everybody else than me, but that's okay because I'm still okay!

If the effects of pervasive surveillance are a negative to society it doesn't matter that you're benefitting - your "bargain" will have to cease existing.

My "bargain" is my choice, and the choice of anyone who wants to make it, and no one gets to rip that away from us because they're afraid of some boogeyman who will never come.

The real conceit comes from people who think the rest of us don't know what we're doing; we do, and we don't care because it doesn't matter. Those people have no special information, and they're not smarter than us.

There is no boogeyman, there are no "dire consequences", and the people peddling that nonsense are tilting at windmills.

No one will come to you and forbid you from using Google or Facebook.

If everything goes right, government and society will instead pressure those companies to offer honest alternatives to their existing spying-based services and make it cristal clear how one pays.

The masochist, careless and indifferent will likely still be able to use the services they know and love, but their lack of interest will no longer be paid for by everyone.

Smoking was also pretty cool at one point...

"Spying-based services" is some truly disingenuous labeling.

As we dont know what the future will bring ethnic clensing is a realistic cenario.

It wont happen or it wont happen to me lacks optimism about how long the future lasts.

I'm willing to experience a higher quality of day-to-day life while not being prepared for an "ethnic cleansing", so it is not part of my threat model.

If a company uses the tracking data to personalize prizes of stuff that you are interested in, you suddenly might pay much more than you think without ever being aware of it.

I doubt that a) companies would do that in general and b) the few that do are charging low enough of a premium that they're still competitive.

You doubt that companies would do this? Amazon already does it. Airline companies use location heuristics.

> Amazon already does it.

No they don't.