HACKER Q&A
📣 blindprogrammer

Is being concerned about privacy holding you back as a developer?


When I observe the most innovative advertising companies on the internet, such as Facebook and Google, their apparent disregard for privacy is striking. Similarly, my experience suggests that the vast majority of the public, with the exception of developers, are generally unconcerned about privacy as long as they perceive a tangible benefit in exchange for compromising it.

I have numerous software product ideas, but I often hesitate to pursue them when I envision how they might function in the real world. Privacy concerns prevent me from using such products personally, and this hesitation extends to my willingness to develop them.

As a developer, if you prioritize both your own privacy and the privacy of your customers, does this concern prevent you from creating exceptional applications?

Many financial applications offer valuable insights into personal finances, but often at the cost of invading user privacy.These apps often collect, analyze, and sell user data to provide these features.

Despite this, millions of users willingly share their personal financial information with these apps, seemingly unconcerned about the potential consequences, as long as they receive the desired features in return. Is privacy a luxury that only developers and technology professionals can afford?

  👤 wryoak Accepted Answer ✓
There are probably some exposure-based biases at play here. Developers deal with privacy every day as a matter of their hobby/profession. Salience leads them to see privacy issues everywhere and pervasive incentives for antagonistic actors even when, given the billions of data transactions occurring across the untold millions of applications and servers, they are statistically rare. The less inclined technologically only hear about the big events and such issues quickly fade from their memory, especially when they don’t truly understand the scope or details of the problem, and therefore tend to feel like nothing bad can happen to them. Data leaks, fraud and identify theft are things that happen to _other people_, and they can trade in their data casually and carefree.
👤 JohnFen
> As a developer, if you prioritize both your own privacy and the privacy of your customers, does this concern prevent you from creating exceptional applications?

I don't think so. Not even a little. What it does, though, is constrain the sorts of applications I'm willing to use or develop. I don't think that's a bad thing at all.

> Is privacy a luxury that only developers and technology professionals can afford?

Also not even a little. People are willing to trade privacy for convenience, but that's not at all the same thing as privacy being some sort of unaffordable luxury. It's not expensive to forgo some convenience.

👤 hiAndrewQuinn
I'd say it's the opposite. As a developer it's part of our professional responsibilities to at least try to erect privacy- and security-preserving systems, because, well, we're the experts. I don't want a world where the average computer user has to be paranoid about their computer privacy any more than I want the average bridge user to have to be paranoid about whether this or that bridge is more likely to give way during their daily commute.
👤 PaulHoule
No.
👤 ActorNightly
"Privacy" as a concept is for the most part the virtue signal of the tech world. Most people who are super vocal about privacy don't actually care about privacy, they just use it as an ideology to set themselves apart in some sort of way that they perceive to be virtuous.

The two areas that privacy is mentioned in is in what companies government ought to do (and legislation surrounding it) , and what constitutes privacy.

For the former, there are some merits to having legislation around privacy that aren't a virtue signal - for example, you don't want insurance companies having direct info of your private life to raise rates on you in somewhat broken medical system based on statistical risks that you may not exhibit, so you probably want some legislation around companies handling PII data and not selling it, even if this is not a final or a complete solution. However, the discussions around this are usually never about this - most people concerned about privacy have very little no idea of the legislation that is already in place, and there are some pretty strong ones already in US, and even stronger ones in EU). Most of the concern is about just companies not collecting data in the first place, without understanding what that actually means.

For the latter, going off the last sentence, most people don't actually understand (or more charitably think about) what privacy actually means. For example, if you use any Apple products, you don't have privacy. You can traffic capture any Apple device and see how many times it phones home. This is not privacy. Oh you trust Apple not to sell data or use it for any nefarious means? Well I trust FB and Google and any advertisers that they have been in contact with not to do the same. So realistically we both draw some line of privacy, where things that require private data but are super convenient we accept as ok, while things that we don't really care about that much are not worth it for privacy.

So no, I personally dgaf about "privacy" as you talk about it. There is enough legislation to protect data that actually matters against misuse, and as technology evolved, there has never been any indication that anything there is broken.