I&#x27;ve noticed you doing this over and over; you extrapolate an impossibly generalized statement from a user, inferring details which were not implied or explicitly stated. He made no such opinion statement on copyrights or patents.<p>Your views on privacy have been questioned <i>ad nauseum</i> on HN, and your replies frequently do not address the very <i>real</i> concern that people raise: the misuse of &quot;private&quot; information by <i>those in authority</i>. Or, if you do, it&#x27;s a very hand-wavy statement to the effect of &quot;if information was freely available to anyone, that power wouldn&#x27;t be a big deal&quot;. It&#x27;s simply not a response that addresses the facts: the concern by those with a desire to protect their privacy stems from their &quot;private&quot; information being used by someone in a position to do physical, economical or psychological harm to them. You&#x27;ve never addressed that, that I can see. Your government, unless you are the sole government of your own little island somewhere, is in a position to harm you. They give a vanishingly small number of fucks about your life as an individual, and wouldn&#x27;t bat an eye at taking your &quot;private&quot; information out of context and using it to disrupt your life if it suits their needs.<p>I know statements like mine will never convince you that your perception of how the real world works is quite different from its realities; I do not make them to convince you. I appreciate the seed of hope for the future that you believe you&#x27;re sowing by arguing your point on HN, and it would be an amazing place to live. Given, however, the ways in which the human condition manifests itself in a society where there are people with power over others - no matter where that power comes from - that world is a fiction. In our reality, we lowly citizens have few advantages over the powerful few, and until the human condition evolves to allow a Gene Roddenberry-esque utopian society to form on Earth, the right to privacy will always be sacred to those of us who want to have some semblance of control over our future.