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> It’s all an invasion of privacy until you’re sitting on the other side of the table where you have a vested interest in getting access to the information.

That’s the thing about privacy that so many don’t want to admit. “Everyone deserves it, until they don’t”. All of society’s privacy is more important than your single child, sorry.

Meanwhile I created this great new technology. It runs in the background super efficiently on your phone. It immediately detects housefires and alerts you. It uses a combination of sensors to literally detect the spark of flame and there’s only one in 1 trillion false positives.

Simply download the app and give it permission to sample your microphones, cameras, accelerometers and historical gps data to build a profile, then flick a lighter anywhere in your house and sure enough your phone alarm goes off.

How it works is incredible, an algorithm listens for supersonic soundwaves created by the chemical reaction during combustion. Video and sound samples are then reviewed by one of our technical representatives.

Housefires and house fire deaths will be a thing of the past. The only compromise is that our algorithms listen to all of your video and audio and occasionally monitored by a human technician, which might include audio of you making love to your wife.



> "All of society’s privacy is more important than your single child, sorry." "which might include audio of you making love to your wife."

You and your wife bumping uglies just isn't that special, your embarassment about it is way out of proportion to the amount necessary. The fact that you would rather people die in house fires than a small chance that a stranger hears you breathing heavily and talking dirty should cause you a lot more concern than it seems to be causing you.


Just to be clear, you're saying that it's unreasonable to prefer everyone having private bedroom conversations over the elimination of spontaneous house fires?

That it's worth having a random human being able to listen to all said conversations?

To me at least it's incredibly reasonable to make that tradeoff. As a society we make tradeoffs all the time and people die as a result. Some of those tradeoffs are arguably unreasonable but this hypothetical seems very clear...


Just to be clear, you’re saying “I would not undergo temporary embarrassment to avert mass agonising death” and you think that’s incredibly reasonable?




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