Let's say you frequent lots of subreddits that might be considered outside societal norms. Right now that data is ONLY available internally at Reddit.
If the NSA hoovered up this data, suddenly they might learn a lot about you that they didn't know before (although there's probably a fair argument that people probably leave enough other clues scattered across other data sources they likely have access to that make this redundant).
Maybe you aren't looking at things that would set off their alerts for today's hot media topics. But what about the future? What if we end up with a President with a radical discriminatory agenda (a scarily likely possibility at this point unfortunately)? What if suddenly things that may have been frowned upon before by the general public are suddenly made illegal by Executive order or some other horrible twisting of our laws? This provides the government with a great way to narrow down the list and identify targets that have become "inconvenient" for them.
Think it can't happen or that this is an off-the-wall conspiracy theory? Germany and Russia would like to have a chat with you.
Sure, the mainstream users probably won't have any noticeable impact on their lives. For now at least. But this can still have a chilling effect on free speech today, without the nightmare scenario I outlined above occurring.
Let's say you frequent lots of subreddits that might be considered outside societal norms. Right now that data is ONLY available internally at Reddit.
If the NSA hoovered up this data, suddenly they might learn a lot about you that they didn't know before (although there's probably a fair argument that people probably leave enough other clues scattered across other data sources they likely have access to that make this redundant).
Maybe you aren't looking at things that would set off their alerts for today's hot media topics. But what about the future? What if we end up with a President with a radical discriminatory agenda (a scarily likely possibility at this point unfortunately)? What if suddenly things that may have been frowned upon before by the general public are suddenly made illegal by Executive order or some other horrible twisting of our laws? This provides the government with a great way to narrow down the list and identify targets that have become "inconvenient" for them.
Think it can't happen or that this is an off-the-wall conspiracy theory? Germany and Russia would like to have a chat with you.
Sure, the mainstream users probably won't have any noticeable impact on their lives. For now at least. But this can still have a chilling effect on free speech today, without the nightmare scenario I outlined above occurring.
Case in point from a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11374839