This is melodramatic high school Hamlet-ism. It’s also silly - there has obviously been a case where the first speech was censured. It happened before civilizations. Are we all still damaged and bondaged by that?

Look, speech is important. So is protecting the public good. But if one believes in absolutes, rather than takeoffs, they are IMO getting too high on their own supply.

Let’s talk about the trade offs that we have already made.

Does the fact that the NSA can comb your personal files and look at people's nude photographs not concern you? That's a present day reality brought to light by Snowden. Showing a colleague a 'good find' was considered a perk of the job.

We're lying to ourselves if we think this couldn't be abused and can implicitly be trusted. We should generally be sceptical of closed source at the best of times, let alone when it's inherently designed to report on us.

To your point of 'as a layman end user what is the cost to me?': more code running on your computer doing potentially anything which you have no way to audit -> compromising the security of whatever is on your computer, and an uptick in cpu/disk/network utilisation (although it remains to be seen if it's anything other than negligible).

My defeated mentality is partly - 'well they're already spying on us anyway'...

> This is melodramatic high school Hamlet-ism. It’s also silly - there has obviously been a case where the first speech was censured. It happened before civilizations. Are we all still damaged and bondaged by that?

Frankly, yes.

That seems like a ‘no’ then.