dacodanelson

Folks aren't worried burglers will steal their photos because the photos are objectively precious, they are worried that the photos will be stolen because burglers steal things which are precious, and since family photos are considered precious to most people they make a faulty connection. It's irrational, but so is most everything we do as a society when you look at it closely.

Webcams being hackable means people can begin to irrationally fear for their privacy in their own homes. Rather than be free to move about and do as they wish, they second-guess whether someone would be watching, and even though they have no logical obligation to appease this unknown third-party's desires for propriety, they're going to be concerned about breaking norms. "I hope I don't look like a slob, or pick my nose, or start whacking it or ... " anything, because we all have a nervousness about being a particular way when others are around, even when we don't know those people or, as in this case, those people have no right to be there in the first place.

It's dumb and irrational and you can dissect it a million different ways and wax poetic about what it "says about society" or human psychology, but in the end it's just another expectation most people have - that their privacy in certain places will not be invaded and they are free to let their guard down - and as engineers and developers and everything else, it's our job to work within those constraints if we want user adoption, or at least if we want good-will.

Is it rational that people want privacy but they also want to post their thoughts and photos and videos online where anybody can see them forever? Nope. That's humans for you though, and the people who capitalized on letting them do it are now wealthier than most of us can imagine. Finding a way to reliably both actually make a webcam free from being useful to hijackers, and to prove to and convince the public that it is so, is a lucrative opportunity - I would say especially so in this new pandemic age.

My first reaction was to scoff at this, but you might be on to something! I discussed the idea of "not wanting to hurt vendors' feelings" being a driver behind choosing 100% ratings versus more accurate reflections from consumers, but I hadn't considered that maybe people's feelings in that regard were influenced by the fact that every app and product begs to be rated that way. "Did we fulfill the basic requirements? Please rate us five stars!" Is that anywhere in the ballpark of what you mean?

I am actually working on a follow-up about Ted Nelson and Project Xanadu. I know it never really came to anything, but it's really fascinating the way this brilliant, Memex-like system was what all the visionaries were talking about, and what we got was a giant directory of pseudo-printed pages.