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mindslight • today at 4:15 PM • 0 replies • view on HN

While I agree with where you're coming from in general, the surveillance industry has been happily coasting on downplaying and rejecting such principles for quite some time. Principles like freedom of speech, freedom to own things you purchase, privacy from ever-growing surveillance databases, freedom from unaccountable centralized permissions systems based on those surveillance databases, freedom to use computing technology that serves your own interests, freedom to partake in competitive markets rather than suffering monopolies. That general lack of principles (beyond merely centralized authoritarian control) is now coming home to roost, as people oppose these projects due to some vague sense of a lack of individual agency, but perhaps can't quite articulate why.

If their concerns had been acted on to begin with, most of the existing data centers would never have been built as people would be using computing technology under their own control rather than authoritarian-by-design "cloud" traps. So I have little sympathy for the surveillance industry now that the jig is nearly up.