Ok, since everyone here is making baseless claims about privacy, why don't we just buy one for science and monitor the network traffic on it? Problem solved.
Getting really tired of HN stating obvious paranoia instead of talking about innovation these days. Yes, I get that privacy concerns exist, and this should always be kept in mind. But when more than 90% of the comments are about that, and circulating on completely theoretical claims, we've lost all value in the conversation.
I think we're in both a time and among an audience (HN readers) where privacy/surveillance issues tend to drive the conversation. I don't think that's bad, but I agree that it's a little disappointing that the main reaction among the HN crowd to the promise of ubiquitous computing is to immediately focus on all the ways it can be used for evil.
My own take, which is either naive or mercilessly pragmatic depending on how you look at it, is that it's going to be a lot more productive to start thinking about how to protect privacy -- and, bluntly, what tradeoffs we're comfortable making as a society, which may not mean "share nothing unless explicitly told otherwise" -- in an always-on, always-connected world where networking will almost certainly become so pervasive that we largely stop even thinking about "the network."
Getting really tired of HN stating obvious paranoia instead of talking about innovation these days. Yes, I get that privacy concerns exist, and this should always be kept in mind. But when more than 90% of the comments are about that, and circulating on completely theoretical claims, we've lost all value in the conversation.