Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

private-information

2022-12-01 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
private-information
Votey panel for private-information
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic satirizes the contradiction between people's stated concern for data privacy and their actual behavior. A person holds their phone and declares, "My private information is very important to me." A robot standing next to them immediately retorts, "Ah, so you're being nice by sharing it with EVERY SINGLE CORPORATION."

The caption reads: "Building a robot to point out hypocrisy was a mistake." The humor is straightforward: we all claim to value our privacy, yet we willingly hand over vast amounts of personal data to tech companies, social media platforms, and apps through our smartphones. The robot simply states the obvious contradiction that humans prefer not to acknowledge. The "mistake" of building such a robot is that nobody actually wants their hypocrisy pointed out to them -- the value of the cognitive dissonance is that it lets people feel virtuous about privacy while doing nothing to protect it.

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