You know, if nobody cares about this, then why are people constantly up in arms whenever yet-another-Facebook-privacy-scandal surfaces?

Why people object to have e.g. their financial or medical information disclosed?

Yes, there are people who are "sheep" in the sense that they would do anything if there is some voucher or discount for it. But most people would also object to a camera in their bedroom or photos of their kids being posted publicly online for everyone to see.

You are right that most of the stuff is absolutely mundane, especially in isolation. However, with a bit of analysis one could suddenly learn things about you that you would likely want to keep private - e.g. your sexual fetishes, whether or not you have some illness (insurers and some employers would kill for such info!), your political views, ton of data about your interests, which TV shows you are watching, etc. That's an absolute bonanza of data that makes any marketer salivate and see dollar signs. And a gold mine for all sorts of stalkers and creeps too.

> then why are people constantly up in arms whenever yet-another-Facebook-privacy-scandal surfaces?

People are not up in arms. Some group of media and tech people are up in arms. Most do not care. Heck, most do not even hear about the latest scandal.

>then why are people constantly up in arms whenever yet-another-Facebook-privacy-scandal surfaces?

Who? Leo Laporte? Kara Swisher? Talking heads on cable news? It's their job to be shocked and outraged.

> then why are people constantly up in arms whenever yet-another-Facebook-privacy-scandal surfaces?

Who is? Outside of HN I haven't heard a single thing about it. People don't care.

"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."

What's baffling is how many times this same conversation has played out and people like you still don't get it.

There is a difference, though. I agree privacy is important as a principle, and we need to protect the right to it. But privacy is also not important to me, so I can use services that require me to give up some of it. I want people to be able to maintain privacy if they want to or need to, but I might not care about giving up my own.

I am baffled that people like yourself are not concerned in the least.

I grew up in an Eastern Europe Communist State where this kind of personal surveillance was the norm. People went and wrote down all their interactions with others. You can see these documents now as the former secret police archives were published (what wasn't destroyed to protect the higher ups).

It's amazing how the most innocuous remarks can be used against yourself in an unbelivable twists. Just an example: Person A criticized person C, which was his boss, as being incompetent, to person B, which was a secretly delator. Person B went and reported to the secret police this tension, as he was payed on the number of pages he would write.

The secret police compiled a weekly report of stuff that would happen, in each company, and send it up to the party for review. It just happened in the party that somebody who saw the report had frictions with that Boss, and he used that report to push the Boss around. The Boss thought that person A himself wrote the report, and used his connections to get person A fired, and banned, on the party line, from ever having a qualified-work position again - ie he could not be an engineer, teacher, or anything, leaving him with just construction work or janitorial jobs.

How often do you bitch about your boss? How would you like that your boss gets reports about what you bitch about him in your own home? How would you like that what you say, no matter how private you want it to be, is always recorded?

I'm astounded by the fact that people see nothing wrong having these devices always listening to them.

Because your phone, or computer, or tablet can record your voice and far worse.

>I am baffled that people like yourself are not concerned in the least.

>I grew up in an Eastern Europe Communist State where this kind of personal surveillance was the norm.

Do you feel the same about smartphones? They record location, are capable of recording audio and video, if you have wifi and/or bluetooth on they can record every device ID you come within range of, they can in theory record everything you do in every app you use.

Don't get me wrong, I recognize the surveillance value/implications of such devices. As Pokemon Go was starting to initially gain popularity I even wrote a piece showing how such an app would be extremely useful as a tool for HUMINT.

TLDR: You create a game location, like a gym, in an area you want to surveil or deploy a rare spawn in a location you want to surveil. You then sprinkle it out on social media geo-targeting, then people flock to the area with their app that already chew through data and point their phone's camera all around the area giving you video and audio that you can either pull in real time at a risky data-cost or grab still images and then decide if you want to compress captured video and send it or leave it uncompressed and upload when the device connects to WiFi next.

Here's the post https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2016/7/11/pokmon-go... and please, 'pokemon go funded by the CIA' was not something I believe then or now but there is a direct connection to the U.S. intelligence community via funding John Hanke received for a previous company.

Well, they made an active decision to buy a device specifically meant to record them and provide responses to said recording. It would be another thing to find out a phone records every conversation passively, but these devices are literally made for the purposes of recording you.

That kind of sounds like a self inflicted wound if they actually cared about privacy.

This is all said with the presumption that the devices actually are surreptitiously recording. Which is far from proven but already addressed by other comments here.

OK, by your definition of "recording", a laptop contains several I/O devices that "record" my input, not just webcam and microphone, but keyboard as well. I guess I should just shrug at the revelation that it comes with a keylogger. Because hey, if I didn't want my written thoughts to be recorded, why did I buy a memory-enabled Internet-connected device to do actually that?

Don't put words into my mouth, I never said that.

I even used the example of a phone recording you being bad because that wasn't the primary purpose of the device when bought. That argument obviously applies to laptops for the same reason.

But if you as a consumer decide to buy a device who's literal only purpose is to record you, then you don't also get to cry out about it recording you. That's the very definition of a self inflicted wound.

It has 7 microphones and its only purpose is to record you, then respond to your request. That's literally the only thing the device is made to do.