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points by ipsum2 8 hours ago | 0 comments

That's because HN is an echo chamber. Plenty of tech people use and enjoy Muse/Instagram/Facebook, but the would be downvoted if they expressed it.

[–] baq 7 hours ago

I disagree. I would gladly hear why they think there are no privacy concerns or why they don’t care about their privacy so much. I find it hard to understand.

[–] nl 6 hours ago

I'm a long time HN user. I work on privacy tech (as in I'm paid to work on it).

I have a Facebook account and use Instagram.

My reasons are many:

I believe it should be my choice what happens to my data, and don't particularly care if Meta has the parts I share with them.

I don't believe advertising is intrinsically evil, and in fact I think it's probably been a net-good for society.

I think Meta is a better steward of my data than ISPs or telecoms.

[–] saikia81 4 hours ago

what about the abuse of advertisements to cause civil unrest, abusing data to control political elections, advertisements that break consumer laws. Facebook has shown it cares more for money than being a steward. Don't see how you can trust them.

[–] nl 57 minutes ago

I'm aware there are downsides.

I'm old enough to have lived without the internet. I'll take this over that anytime.

> Facebook has shown it cares more for money than being a steward. Don't see how you can trust them.

It's precisely this love of money that make me trust them. They value what they get from my data, so they do their best to keep it to themselves.

That's much better than ISP (for example) that sell raw traffic data.

[–] hhthuuuh 18 minutes ago

lol no.

It’s the law that keeps them in check.

[–] dovin 7 hours ago

I use Muse to read X for me with a burner account, since I want to follow certain topics but don't want to use X. It posts digests a couple times a week to a discord channel I gave it access to. It's fine and I think there are plenty of ways of using it that give essentially nothing to Meta in the way of data. Still I wouldn't recommend it to any of my non-technical friends, since I think the natural progression with these things is to just connect more and more parts of your life to them.

[–] Karrot_Kream 7 hours ago

Almost all of my tech worker friends use Instagram. It's almost universally used. I never talk about it because anything positive about any Meta property on this site gets downvoted. It's been like this for years and only gotten worse over time.

[–] BeetleB 6 hours ago

I said the same for years after smartphones came around.

In my book, if you use a Smartphone that's either Android or iPhone, I can't take seriously the claim that you value your privacy.

Privacy is a continuum.