> Why wouldn't they? It's an additional income stream.

If customers cared, the additional income from being someone who didn't surveil could outstrip the income stream from surveilling.

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nazgulsenpai 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I agree with you, and if you frequent tech circles you'd be under impression that the masses prioritize lack of surveillance and privacy. In my experience with IRL acquaintances, although anecdotal, exactly 0% of people I have spoken to where it's come up in conversation care at all about privacy or surveillance in general with the old "nothing to hide" fallacy.

	▲	horsawlarway 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It just takes some more explaining. Most folks do care, they just don't understand. When you stop with the high level topics like "surveillance" and start in on the practical impacts like: - They charge you more if they know you want something (ex - dynamic pricing). - They try to get you addicted (gambling, vapes, social media) - They feed you lies (curated social bubbles) - They manipulate elections (targeted campaigns and ads, targeted social policies) Etc... most people do actually care, they just struggle to relate the words the industry uses with the real impacts. Folks tend to think of privacy like someone opening the bathroom door on them (and this gets immediate pushback... see all the articles about the Roomba cameras). But the surveillance we're under now is more subtle and insidious, less visceral. Harder for folks to understand without concrete impacts. ---- The reason so many tech people care is because lots of them get to watch the sausage being made, and they understand.
	▲	pizzly 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I know its won't solve everything but couldn't we teach digital hygiene at school and its importance. For myself I remember in English at high school being taught how different methods of advertising worked and that stuck with me.
	▲	jonahx 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		That's my experience as well. However, I suspect a lot of it is not really understanding the situation, and not wanting to be bothered learning about it. In other words, I think it's possible those preferences could be changed with the right kind cultural or legal shifts. Even in my lifetime, I look at how massively public attitudes have changed around smoking, wearing seatbelts, and recycling, to take 3 examples. Each of those seemed equally immovable at one time.
	▲	keybored 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Technologists seem to lack professional integrity. This blasé blame-the-victim attitude is completely normalized but I don’t think it makes sense if you zoom out far enough. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757509 There are many exceptions and initiatives like truly altruistic OSS projects which aim to empower users. But by and large what we have ended up with is a divide between the tech-empowered and in-the-knows (surveillance etc.) contrasted with people who just want to access their photos on their phone and their computer. The everyman being enlightened to all the abstract BS in IT is untenable. But programmers aren’t stepping up to collectively protect all of us.

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oaweoifjwpo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's almost never the sole or core differentiator though. And getting customers to all coordinate and care is much more difficult than getting a couple CEOs to just decide to surveil.

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hdgvhicv 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The old “vote with the wallet” fallacy