Peter Thiel: The Online Privacy Debate Won’t End With Gawker
The balls on this guy. The sheer cynical audacity of trying to market yourself as a &quot;defender of privacy&quot; when you serve on the board of a company so antithetical to privacy that they&#x27;re under federal supervision for twenty years [1] is breathtaking. Please tell me no one on Hacker News is dumb enough to fall for this.<p>My Google-fu is failing me on the exact link (can someone help?), but Marc Andreessen once penned some breathless, excited editorial about &quot;the future of media&quot;, and at one point he talked about the editorial&#x2F;advertising firewall as a relic that needed to be abandoned. It was so slickly inserted that you could almost forget what he was really saying: that news desks need to be prevented from reporting things that companies rather they didn&#x27;t.<p>Every time a VC tries to tell me &quot;what&#x27;s wrong with the media&quot;, I reach for my gun. Everyone: they&#x27;re not your friends. They&#x27;re not trying to help you. Their overriding concern is nurturing the value of their investments, and that sometimes means silencing people who report inconvenient truths.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;11&#x2F;30&#x2F;technology&#x2F;facebook-agrees-to-ftc-settlement-on-privacy.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;11&#x2F;30&#x2F;technology&#x2F;facebook-agrees...</a><p>(reposted from other submission)