> Have you considered the possibility that the average person doesn't
care that much about privacy?
I have. I considered it in depth and did a good deal of psychological
research on it. Then I went out onto the street and asked people;
dozens and dozens of ordinary people, old, young, rich, poor...
Result: People really care about privacy.
You can read all about it in the podcast and blog I am not allowed to
mention here.
What you're alluding to I think is the idea that people do not fully
understand the link between technology and privacy violation.
Our view here is also biased. The idea that "people don't care that
much about privacy" naturally gets bandied around amongst developers
for whom profitable software designs do violate people's privacy.
When you say “profitable software designs” my bet is that if you have any person off the street a “tour” of google and how their data is actually treated, more than 1/3 of them would be okay with sharing that information, and wouldn’t believe it to be a violation of their privacy.
What happened to Google on privacy could easily happen to any company- people complained about the total amount of data Google had, the gut response of the devs was
“oh, you can trust us, we’re not using it for anything nefarious, just features/debugging”
And then Apple took that and used it as a marketing opportunity.
And now, once you get to a certain size, you start having to develop without metrics/logs, or go through a bunch of red tape to get them.
I have. I considered it in depth and did a good deal of psychological research on it. Then I went out onto the street and asked people; dozens and dozens of ordinary people, old, young, rich, poor...
Result: People really care about privacy.
You can read all about it in the podcast and blog I am not allowed to mention here.
What you're alluding to I think is the idea that people do not fully understand the link between technology and privacy violation.
Our view here is also biased. The idea that "people don't care that much about privacy" naturally gets bandied around amongst developers for whom profitable software designs do violate people's privacy.