Please don't take HN threads into off-topic flamewar like this. Obviously those things are more important than doorbell trackers. They're important than almost everything else that appears on HN, too. That's why the guidelines ask you not to do this—because otherwise every thread will become about something more important, and with increasing levels of rage.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: since you've been using this account to break the site guidelines repeatedly, I've banned it. Creating accounts to do that with will eventually get your main account banned as well, so please don't do that.

Are you suggesting that we can't worry about anything unless people are literally dying?

That's so banal.

Is this the laziest possible argument? It's close. Anyone with 3 seconds to spend on Google can find a nice pet problem that dwarves yours. Painting issues as "white people problems" is a nice way to bring race into something that had nothing to do with it.

If everyone were so easily disarmed as you, it would be simple to accomplish nefarious things. Simply remind people that someone out there is perpetrating a ReallyBadThing so that everyone wrings their hands about ReallyBadThing happening and doesn't worry about other MinorBadThings happening left and right.

It must suck to not be able to focus on more than one thing at once.

You’re totally just spouting a false dilemma.

Guess what, I can not use plastic straws, be worried about video collection, AND police brutality! Crazy, right?

But go use your plastic straws, because you’re WOKE to the real issues.

Two things can be bad at once

Obviously humans are only capable of only caring about one issue at a time, so your criticism is unquestionably valid.

I wonder about that, after looking at HNs level of response to privacy issues.

First, if you look at the number of topics covering privacy issues on this site it completely dwarfs news about people getting killed in Ukraine, for example. But we can argue that's related to the interest of its readers, but then isn't exactly what the OP is complaining about, that the readers on HN seem more concerned about privacy than war and policy brutality?

Another aspect is the level of concern on such an article. If all we saw in reply to this kind of articles would be rational, healthy discussion about these issues at a level of emotional response that corresponds to how important these things are in the grand scheme of things that would be fine, because it makes easy to believe that the same persons would be much more worried about more serious issues. But unfortunately a lot of replies on this kind of privacy topics are so strong that I can only draw 2 conclusions: either those people don't care about more important issues and this seems like some of the most important problems they are facing in their life (that's what the OP is saying) _or_, maybe they do care about more important issues too but the response to those is likely going to be so strong that they would be completely irrational about it, which I guess is also possible, but sad.

The people dealing with privacy issues are not the same people that deal with police brutality or the ones declaring wars.

That's like saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you don't have anything to say

Many people close the door when they go to the toilet. Why, then, if they have nothing to hide?

What's even more amazing is people close the door when they are home alone. Who are we hiding from?

You could down vote the story and just move on. No need to read the article or come in and make comments. No need to be bored.

You can't downvote stories on HN, but there's a convenient "hide" button just under the title for those who don't wish to read the article.