> Why the heck people will continuously give away private information with no safeguard that information will ever remain private in the future, I will never understand
I do understand. People don't evaluate risk correctly. They are fundamentally irrational in all sorts of strange ways. Humans have a strong optimism bias[1] so even if they know something bad might happen to some people they know that will happen to other people, not to them. The benefit, even when it's tiny in comparison, they get right now.
Thanks to the fascinating new neuroscience around cognitive biases you too can go from thinking you'll never understand to despairing for the future of humanity!
At least now someone will probably do a Firesheep-esque [2] "look how creepy you can be" app that will get some attention. And that kind of attention is exactly the antidote to the optimism bias as well as many of the others at play here, it's actually very effective because it plays into other well known biases [3][4]
I do understand. People don't evaluate risk correctly. They are fundamentally irrational in all sorts of strange ways. Humans have a strong optimism bias[1] so even if they know something bad might happen to some people they know that will happen to other people, not to them. The benefit, even when it's tiny in comparison, they get right now.
Thanks to the fascinating new neuroscience around cognitive biases you too can go from thinking you'll never understand to despairing for the future of humanity!
At least now someone will probably do a Firesheep-esque [2] "look how creepy you can be" app that will get some attention. And that kind of attention is exactly the antidote to the optimism bias as well as many of the others at play here, it's actually very effective because it plays into other well known biases [3][4]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias
[2] http://codebutler.com/firesheep/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attentional_bias
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic