It seems that the authors tone is not "whiny," but maybe that was my interpretation. He is raising a serious concern: tools that people think are keeping them safe/anonymous are actually not 100% anonymous. I think this is always important to consider. Most of us on HN are technical, and we are already aware of (even worse) privacy "violations" than those described in the article. Nonetheless, most people who use the internet are not aware of this and it will be important to keep the layman informed for his/her own sake and for the future of the net.
The problem is that this trade-off isn't properly explained or qualified in the original posts.
Do you think I'm doing the uninformed public a favor if I go around yelling:
"Vaccines frequently cause fever, pain around the injection site, and muscle aches. In rare cases, much more severe side effects can result from vaccination."?
I agree. The tradeoff was not properly explained or qualified.
<offtopic>
In regards to vaccinations, I think the uninformed public should be provided with all information possible, including scientific evidence of the utility of vaccination and potential, albeit rare, side-effects of vaccination.
</offtopic>
Deliberately depriving people of information is not ethical.
> Deliberately depriving people of information is not ethical.
Misleading people is unethical. Providing incomplete information is misleading.
80% of Americans say they want labels on food warning if they contain DNA[0]. Not because people fear DNA, but because when you ask, that signals that DNA is potentially bad. Actually providing such a label is also a signal that DNA is bad.
Labeling food with "Warning: contains DNA" is unethical because it misleads people into thinking that's bad.
Adding a label saying "DNA-free" is unethical because it's false, unless you're selling salt. (And probably also misleading: https://xkcd.com/641/ )
But failing to provide such a label? Not misleading, and not unethical.
If someone asks "does X phone home, does Y contain DNA", you should answer honestly, but you should probably also provide explain the pros/cons. Granted, unless you planted the idea in their heads, that's not your responsibility, but if you publish an article saying "Food X contains DNA!" or "Plugin Y phones home!" you _are_ responsible for the resulting fear, and should qualify the information with an honest evaluation of what that means.
Did you know that dihydrogen monoxide was responsible for at least 368,000 deaths[1] worldwide in 2013? In the USA it's the second leading cause of death for children under 12 years old. Surely you'd want to know if a product had dihydrogen monoxide in it.
I'd say you've hit the nail squarely on the head here.
As an (amusingly directly relevant to the side-discussion) example, in a college English course I took we had a group project and presentation in which we had to take a position on an issue. Despite it being dangerous territory, my group dove directly into the vaccine debate. After beginning our research (note that this was prior to the major cited paper(s) on the issue being retracted) we decided that we would work very carefully, within the guidelines of the project, to advocate that any and all possible links should be researched farther. Technically this position was not a great fit for the directions we had been given, but we wanted to be very careful to say "this might be an issue and should be investigated in more detail" rather than "this is a problem and we fix it with [x]."
TL;DR: Taking the hard line is often a bad call, but calling for something to be looked into (with cause) is often wise. If you read the newsgroup post to the end, this is exactly what the author does, albeit with some important context to the issue omitted.
While true, that's more a problem of the person hearing the truth versus the person sharing the truth.
Since I can already see the objection to saying that, I don't necessary think it's always fair to blame someone for hearing the truth and not comprehending it.
