"if you know you know" isn't an argument. This is just empty rhetoric -- dogmatically asserting that tracking ads damage society and that I'm being controlled by it is a pretty strong claim, and a claim that requires evidence to support it.

If this is the typical quality of your privacy argumentation then it should be no surprise that your children don't buy your arguments.

You're not going to win this "fight" on HN, I've been here for years. People here are convinced that every piece of data being collected is a moral evil.

They'll vaguely wave at things like DNS logs or server IP logs, and always assume that everything is always feeding huge tracking machines at big companies. They'll mix up tracking used for logs with tracking used for ads with tracking used to improve the product. There's no real understanding of what cohort sizes or signals are needed to make tracking meaningful. It's a mess.

IMO it's good to be sensitive about the data we send and hold tech companies accountable for how much data they take. I've also worked on big tech teams that collect data. But the arguments here are always so black-and-white that they don't make any meaningful point.

The target audience for my comments are the hundreds of people reading and not commenting. If you're casually reading the comments, without a foil of reasonability, I think it's easy to get sucked into implicitly accepting the premises of the zealots frothing at the mouth in the comments. You're right that I don't imagine I'm going to change the mind of the zealots.

I, for one, appreciate the points you are making here, and the doggedness with which you are making them. I basically feel the same way, but I don't usually comment on these discussions because of the general shrillness of the discussion.

Indeed, as a wise man once said, "the haters are going to hate".

I think it is a combination of shell shock reaction and lack of data literacy. Some companies have abused their sysadmin privileges, and people now have much less trust for other big entities. I also work in the data business albeit currently in operational/industrial data. We can abuse robots all we want as they have no rights. Cyborgs on the other hand are much more complicated. I understand the scale and types of data impacts.

I wasn't making an argument about privacy with that statement. I said that if certain knowledge is valuable to you, then visualizations of that data would be valuable. Some people like to be watched and controlled similarly to how some people want to be ruled by rulers. I accept that as human nature. If you are watched by someone in a greater power position who wants power over you, do you think this gives them more control or power over you or not?