alt Hacker NewsUsers don’t care about “privacy”. If they did, Meta and Alphabet wouldn’t be worth $1T+.
Users really don’t matter at all. The revenue for AI companies will be B2B where the user is not the customer - including coding agents. Most people don’t even use computers as their primary “computing device” and most people are buying crappy low end Android phones - no I’m not saying all Android phones are crappy. But that’s what most people are buying with the average selling price of an Android phone being $300.
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Different users. Many people care about privacy and aren’t using Meta products. And many businesses care about it too and have information policies to protect their IP.
Yeah I agree, I fear users don’t care “enough” about privacy that it will matter. :(
Care at all sure, but enough to make a difference, the history of the web and recent computing history indicates otherwise.
I see it as a long-term tradeoff on user freedom. You pay upfront for a capable hardware, you get your services running locally (you don’t pay subscriptions). Or you buy cheap hardware, you still need the same services “running in some cloud” for $X monthly. X goes up depending on the corporate bottom-line
User's care about privacy when they understand the threat and impact. The issue is most user's don't understand this, especially when it comes to use of products like Meta where on the surface, everything appears harmless.
Have you done A/B tests to see if consumers prefer Facebook with or without privacy?
No? What? Oh, you can't?
Neither can consumers. Most consumers are very aware of the lack of privacy, the manipulation, and have very cynical feelings about Facebook and similar companies. But it's where their friends and family are.
For most people the web is a mine field maze where basic things they want are compromised everywhere. And they are routinely creeped out by ads that reveal they know them far too personally.
You are mistaking network capture for preference.
Another telling example. Lots of privacy valuing technical people, who would never have a Facebook account, send unencrypted text emails.
It is network capture, not preference.
It’s not all or nothing there ads trade offs. The fact that Apple still bothers to expend marketing effort on its privacy chops suggests significant numbers of people still do care.
Users here probably means corporations. I still don’t see much use of LLMs in my personal life, other than one thing. Googling stuff in a foreign language.
"Users" is a large set of people. Many don't care about privacy, but some do. There's also a difference between where you post random social media stuff vs what you run with something like OpenClaw and give access to your machine.
you are missing a but 'given a choice' disclaimer. Meta is pretty much a monopoly in social space. So is Android. given a choice people will absolutely gravitate towards not-always-snooping device. most people with resources anyway, who matter for the AI adoption.
Oh an wait till ad companies start selling your healthcare data and you will see how fast things turn 'given a choice'.
> Users don’t care about “privacy”.
I worked for a research focused AI startup that had a strict "no external LLM" policy for code touching our core research.
You're right that the average consumer doesn't care about privacy, but there are many, many users who do. The average consumer also don't have a desktop with GPU or high end Mac Studio, but that doesn't mean there aren't many people working with AI how do have these things.
If we continue to see improvements in running local models, and RAM prices continue to fall as they have in the last month, then suddenly you don't have to worry about token counts any more and can be much more trusting of your agents since they are fully under your control.