<story><title>Why you should bet big on privacy</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/17/why-you-should-bet-big-on-privacy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AgentME</author><text>I like the article, but a line in it triggers one of my pet peeves.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;These companies are basically engaging in mass surveillance. Just as governments justify tracking us to prevent terrorist attacks, these companies are tracking us online, without our consent, ...&lt;p&gt;This equivalence that people often draw bugs me, because companies don&amp;#x27;t coerce people into being tracked. I &lt;i&gt;can&lt;/i&gt; choose to or withold my consent with regards to companies. I can pick and choose to do business with more privacy-respecting companies, and I can block my browser from talking to popular tracking domains. Companies can&amp;#x27;t threaten me with legal trouble (jail, etc) if I want to run my own websites or programs that respect privacy or use cryptography.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s government surveillance that I don&amp;#x27;t have a choice of avoiding, short of avoiding the internet. Sure, cryptography does a lot of good, but it&amp;#x27;s a freedom that is repeatedly threatened, especially it seems like whenever anyone makes a too-convenient tool for it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>oulipo</author><text>Hey AgentME, I&amp;#x27;m Mael the co-founder of &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;snips.ai&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;snips.ai&lt;/a&gt;, we wrote the article on TechCrunch to explain why we are building an AI which respect people&amp;#x27;s privacy.&lt;p&gt;You are entirely right in saying that people mostly wilfully accept to be tracked by companies, but we feel they do because they don&amp;#x27;t have alternatives, so they can only assume that some services will only be available if they share their data.&lt;p&gt;We are building Snips because we want to prove that it is feasible to build an AI without storing the data of users on websites where it is exposed to hackers or governments, or to future decisions made by the company (or its next &amp;quot;evil CEO&amp;quot;) that users may not yet be aware of.&lt;p&gt;We believe it will one day be possible to build our AI alter-egos, capable of doing most grunt tasks at our place, if they can access our most intimate data. And this will be only possible through privacy-by-design&lt;p&gt;Building systems with privacy-by-design is the only workable way to minimize risks over time for users!</text></comment>
<story><title>Why you should bet big on privacy</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/17/why-you-should-bet-big-on-privacy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AgentME</author><text>I like the article, but a line in it triggers one of my pet peeves.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;These companies are basically engaging in mass surveillance. Just as governments justify tracking us to prevent terrorist attacks, these companies are tracking us online, without our consent, ...&lt;p&gt;This equivalence that people often draw bugs me, because companies don&amp;#x27;t coerce people into being tracked. I &lt;i&gt;can&lt;/i&gt; choose to or withold my consent with regards to companies. I can pick and choose to do business with more privacy-respecting companies, and I can block my browser from talking to popular tracking domains. Companies can&amp;#x27;t threaten me with legal trouble (jail, etc) if I want to run my own websites or programs that respect privacy or use cryptography.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s government surveillance that I don&amp;#x27;t have a choice of avoiding, short of avoiding the internet. Sure, cryptography does a lot of good, but it&amp;#x27;s a freedom that is repeatedly threatened, especially it seems like whenever anyone makes a too-convenient tool for it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>numlocked</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s technically true, but not practically; tracking pixels, embedded &amp;#x27;like&amp;#x27; buttons, etc. You are being followed around the internet by large companies, even if you don&amp;#x27;t directly use their services and avoid FB, Google, etc. entirely (which I think is a reasonable standard for an average user).&lt;p&gt;I agree the distinction is important in that you can e.g. elect to not be a customer of a company, but can&amp;#x27;t exactly opt out of the government. But there are still plenty of underhanded privacy violations that companies can &amp;#x27;coerce&amp;#x27; you into unknowingly.&lt;p&gt;The best-practice security and privacy tools you cite, like Tor, end-to-end crypto, etc, are just as effective protecting against government privacy violations as they are coporate ones.</text></comment>