Ok, keep going. Clearly draw the line from “X has access to vacuum cleaner cameras” to “X is extracting money from them.”

You already know this Ryan

https://blog.avast.com/what-do-security-cameras-know-about-y...

Data brokers love this data, dont play with me I know you better than that

https://www.cloaked.com/post/the-data-broker-economy-will-hi...

I don't like this kind of surveillance any more than anyone else on HN, but we get this here all the time. People make these posts that X leads to Y and jump way over the details. Sometimes X does lead to Y. Other times, it's the Underpants Gnomes: There's a big "???" step between X and Y that people don't like to take the time to articulate. This is how conspiracy theories take hold--you ignore the ??? and just assume "Of course X leads to Y! We all know it!"

HN should be above that. When we make a claim that X leads to Y we should be ready to show how X leads to X1, which leads to X2, which leads to X3, which leads to Y.

Almost all articles in the press about data collection and privacy are very poor and only focus on what data gets collected, not how it's used, nor how the circle completes and it comes back to harm the source of that data. To its credit, your second link at least lists a single vague example of how it's used, "data can be misused in ways such as fraudulent insurance claims or fake medical histories" but nothing about how that results in harm to the end user. We should expect better from reporters.

We should expect better from HN though, too. Let's not make conspiratorial claims here. I'm going to call them out, even though I am an opponent of this kind of data collection, too.

Yeah well the data to money pipeline is well understood and the basis for the entire surveillance market.

The book Surveillance Capitalism wrote about this a decade ago: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791

If people are still skeptical then they are ignoring reality.

how hard is this to understand. you have a roving camera/microphone in your house and you think that is OK?

Yes? You also have several cameras and microphones in your pocket, and probably wearing more microphones on your head at various times of the day. And so does everyone around you.

GP is correct. "Roving camera/microphone" -> ??? -> "harm". What is "???" and what is "harm" specifically, and how the former leads to the latter, in specific steps?

Why are all us HN old timers in here arguing about this

I thought this was settled

People are walking around with self spy devices and putting them everywhere and giving all their private data to corpos.

That’s not new, we know it happens, we know companies use “anonymized” data for advertising. Its in public records for large companies balance sheets and there are thousands of data brokers who live exclusively on this data.

There are multiple compelling and popular documentaries about this.

What’s the push back here?

Target Y is a closeted homosexual in a country where that is punishable by death.

X now gets monthly checks from Y. Done.

And it's only bad when China does it, not the American company in question. /s