This article is surprisingly thorough. While many important topics are discussed, I believe one in particular contains a lesson that is extremely important for HN readers that are currently implementing tomorrow's popular technologies. Consider the story of Miep, and why we are able to read and learn from Anne Frank's writings today. (emphasis in the original)

Miep ... never read [Anne Frank's diary] *out of respect for Anne’s privacy*.
[She] said if she’d read it she would have felt obligated to destroy it since
it was filled with damning information, including her name and all the others
who helped the family survive, including an (illegal) underground supply network.

This statement is the clearest explanation I have ever read for why some of us have such a strong reaction to the organizations like Facebook, Google, and anybody else that is using "surveillance as a business model". Miep had the decency to respect Anne's privacy and not read her personal information.

When a business like Google asks people for personal information, they usually claim the information "isn't very important" or that they just want to run statistics over it to so the can select better advertisements. Websites regularly use google-analytics-style tracking to try and extract what people read and for how long (or where they point their mouse) so they can do similar statistics tricks. Absolutely everybody wants to merge all that with a vague notion that unifying everything through a (usually 3rd party) "social network" will somehow become profitable.

What personal data are they trying to exploit ("monetize")? The names (and aliases) people use, the connections to their family and what they discuss. Just the "metadata" from something like gmail is probably enough to map out any "supply network". These business that are creating "big data" are making any future "Anne Frank" impossible to hide, and are guaranteeing that any future Miep is captured.

So why do they do this? I see only two options: hubris or collaboration. Reading any HN thread on the subject will revel a lot of people who dismiss the idea of fascism and totalitarianism rising again (I guess they are waiting for actual death camps or something). They insist that they are simply trading some of their privacy for a useful service (that is still owned an operated by someone else), while ignoring that they are forcing their choice onto others when they insist on using Google's email or Facebook's chat servers. Worse, implicit in the argument that they are trading away "their" privacy is the hubris that assumes what is true today will continue, unchanged into the future.

Her father’s disclosure a decade earlier of a single piece of data,
their religion, destroyed his family. The disclosure was a legal
requirement to be issued a passport.

We never know the changes the future will bring, and to presume that you know that some piece of data is "safe" today and will continue to be "safe" in the future requires such a massive amount of hubris that I have a hard time believing it. Which bring me to the other option: they could simply be collaborators, willing to sell their friends and neighbors - and their own future - to anybody that promises enough profit.

sigh - I'm going to stop here, before I say something unkind. I will end with the suggestion that if you liked this article at all, you should watch Aral Balkan's talk[1], which discusses a lot of similar themes.

[1] https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html...