I loved the anecdote on the Jewish census. Because I am always struggling to find examples about why sharing information might not be dangerous now, but it can be later, and you never really now.

I wish the article were about that, about what kind of information we are sharing in the present time, that may come to bite us back.

Here is my spin: Information can be used to your advantage (Relevant ads are good when they work), but it can also be weaponized (Oh, you search a lot for medical conditions?, maybe your insurance provider is interested. Or worse like we saw with Cambridge Analytica, "you seem to be democrat, let me see if I can bias you a little by hitting you where it hurts")

Here is my personal take on the situation from my experience: We are in a data collection period. Google, Facebook, Amazon, even Apple. Apple might be the worst actually. Silently amassing and hoarding data, researching the proper databases that can hold the data. We have seen things coming up in the last years like NoSQL, like Spark, massive analytical tools and real time databases. This is the equivalent of building a weapon.

Then the time of using that weapon comes. How? I wish I knew. I remind myself that we are just one CEO away of things being really bad. We are now under the shadow of people that grew in a different time, with a different set of ethics. Google still has the original founders on the board, Tim Cook is of the Steve Jobs school, Amazon is on its first CEO run. A few decades down the board, a new CEO gets appointed, and new CEO finds that he/she just inherited a massive data repository that can be used whatever he pleased. "Oh, we will never do that"? Sure, wait for the next guy to change their mind very fast, in the name of profits, or protecting a stock going down, or less strict ethics because they didn't live in the time where lack of privacy can kill you personally.

Sometimes I hold from sharing my thoughts, because people might label me as a conspiracy theorist :) But it is indeed on the back on my mind.

"I loved the anecdote on the Jewish census. Because I am always struggling to find examples about why sharing information might not be dangerous now, but it can be later, and you never really now."

The best example of this is the handwritten notes of the Tsars Russian imperial intel/police services in the very late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Handwritten records and notes stored in shacks that were retrieved and indexed around (forgive hazy dates) 1905 and used to track down "revolutionaries".

The implications were not that bad until companies were able to obtain enough information to change our minds and change our votes. Cambridge Analytica weaponized information. Russia weaponized information. Bots and fake accounts are rampant. Facebook is a warzone, in the most literal sense of the word. Their current implementation is a national security threat and a threat to democracy. And Mark Zuckerberg is that CEO that let it happen.

It doesn't matter what information you share. Facebook buys information from everywhere. They aleady know if your relationship status even if you leave it blank. That's the trap. Then their paying customers are given access to you, based on who they want to convince.

This echoes my concerns about the ephemeral nature of trust.

Be as positive as you can about it right now. Assume they don't sell and trade. Assume they don't have data breaches. Assume they don't directly try to use it for evil.

Well I could trust them now. But the future?

Do I trust every employee they could hire for the length of time(forever?) they hold my information?

For private industry, do I trust whoever could buy their company in the future? (FB login for VR anyone?)

We have been lucky enough that no one is obviously directly using this information to kill/incarcerate people.

Well, outside of China anyway but that is somebodies else's problem....

Which is my point. For many people, if it doesn't affect you, it isn't an issue.

Until it does.

> Google still has the original founders on the board

While technically true, they signed out a long time ago from what Google ought to be or ought not to be. That much is evident from Google’s actions and the relegation of “Don’t be evil” and all that.

I see a lot of non-technical people around me who don't get the importance of privacy. Family who buys Alexa and use Facebook for everything. I wrote this in an attempt to explain how far privacy breaches can get, how the implications can be. Then, I tried defining some security terms that non-technical people might run into. Security helps protect their privacy, so I hope to help them make sense of what those terms mean and how they benefit from them.

Are you trying to equate buying an Alexa device or using Facebook to your anecdote? I do not really understand how the concepts are related.

No, that's not what I said. I'm trying to show what sharing sensitive information with companies and governments can lead to.

Your thesis seems to be "Facebook knows you're shopping for a new car therefore Nazis." However well intentioned, it strains credulity. You should make a better case for why privacy matters.

Your thesis seems to be, right now things are good therefore at no point in the future will a 'bad actor' government make Facebook comply and facilitate whatever they need to fulfill their goals. Matter fact, there could be a long term scenario were the company gets nationalized or the data centers confiscated and that's the end of it. This is why other countries don't let foreign social networks operate in their 'digital soil', they are aware of the power of it.

The irony is that this same mentality of 'everything is good' was the same mentality that people probably had when they walked over to auto-register on the census as Jewish back in the day. They just didn't see it coming. If we can learn something from history is that every 100-200 years the status quo gets thrown out the window.

Turn it around. Not "Facebook knows things about you, therefore Nazis" but rather "Nazis existed as a historical fact, therefore what Facebook knows about you is incredibly dangerous."

What percentage of your purchases do you make with credit cards?

This is one of the few times that I found the rambling anecdote relevant, perhaps because it dealt with a significant historical period.

Two things struck me: the Jewish census and the human smugglers. I would have to look up the origin and intent of the census, but the moral is that the existence of such records put people in peril. As for the smugglers, the lesson is that trusted people can use that information to betray you.

How this relates to the modern world is an open question, but the author goes on to suggest parallels: governments persecuting entire peoples, trusted parties collecting data; and solutions: being able to inspect what our software does.

I found the anecdote really helpful too. Privacy almost feels like an instinctual desire, so I often have a hard time articulating why it’s important. The anecdote gave me a good example of how something that seems benign to disclose can be used to a terrible end. I actually wished the article continued on this path because it was so interesting to read about.

uBlock orogin is blocking 88% of requests for me. Still, I'm able to read the actual content.

I don't want to know how does surfing looks like without uBlock.