hdhsisjd

And my point was that your comment came off as dismissive towards the topic of the justification. The parallel point was that presenting this sort of dismissal might fly on Hacker News but it's also why mainstream support has been iffy. I'm not arguing that the entire apparatus is good simply because it can service the elderly, I'm arguing that having a dismissive attitude towards these types of micro-issues, like helping the elderly, is why the movement has been losing steam with the general public. The general public has general needs and dismissing services because of lofty abstract principles might make for appealing tech-centric arguments but it totally fails to provide an alternate solution to the original problem. The topic is political in nature and so political desires can't be ignored or else support will wane.

The example was already given, biometric monitoring could be used to help elderly people who want to maintain their freedom instead of being shoe-horned into a home but it could also be used to decrease staffing costs as well if it can be done in a non-invasive (in the medical sense) fashion. I'm not sure what your grudge against the elderly is or why it's hard to comprehend that as people age their medical needs increase but nothing about this is news to people who work in a field that services older demographics. This whole line of dialogue is a red herring though because, regardless of if you agree or not, the point was that this sort of technology has real use cases that are driven by consumer demand. You can romanticize these experiences all you want but the reason that tech like this finds consumers is because it's meeting real needs. This idea that the populace at large is only okay with data collection because they don't understand it is just a way for privacy advocates to sidestep responsibility for any useful tech that their policies might render impossible.

At least in the usa, the elderly are a severely under served community. Predicting an emergency based on observed biometrics would be incredibly useful to many of them and these sorts of dismissals are exactly why the digital privacy movement has increasingly lost steam with regular people.

I'm not contesting that these technologies and services aren't also going to be used for dubious purposes but the idea that they have no social value is a meme for privileged people who earn enough to be dismissive of the potential savings.