Privacy is one of the things that helps prevent the horrible failure state of democracy; two wolves voting to eat the sheep for dinner. My comment above expresses exactly the kind of fear non-conformists have in zero privacy democracies.
Just by analyzing how you worded your public post, which post you responded to, and the time you posted it, entities you have no awareness of are already learning more about you than you can imagine, and they're using big data techniques to mine that and lots of other sources of data in order to get an incredibly detailed picture of you.
They're making money off that information, and they're gaining power from it.
Do you want to know more about those entities and what they're doing with that information? Would you like to be one of the beneficiaries of your information, or would you like to continue to be left out?
If you embrace privacy, you're also embracing their privacy, and you're reinforcing the increasingly asymmetric, and non-democratic advantage they have over you.
Obviously, no one should be rounded up for anything, but yes, you and I had better open our minds to a better way to live together- and quickly. If you have a solution, by all means, offer it up, but privacy is dead, and if your answer is to try to stuff that genie back in the bottle, it's a non-starter. We need to embrace another path.
If that's what you meant, then neither path sounds easy. They both sound like a giant pain in the butt. However, Path #1 sounds a hell of a lot healthier in the long run to me. It's the one I advocate, because I believe more information is always better. You can certainly argue that it will be abused, but if everyone can see everything, then you can see the abuser doing the abuse as well. That's a key point that's easy to miss.
As to the diminished power, there's a similar argument to be made regarding wealth inequality. Hard to imagine the wealthy would agree to higher taxes if it hurts them, yet some of the most enlightened and even the very wealthiest do believe this, because they understand that while their individual wealth goes down if viewed in isolation, holistically, their true wealth goes up, because they improve the quality their country, its services, and the people they share their lives with.
Also, I don't see why your suggested options are even necessarily in conflict? At least conceptually, I don't see any problem with transparency for governments and corporations, but privacy for individuals (unless they are acting in a role within those organisations)?!
> However, Path #1 sounds a hell of a lot healthier in the long run to me.
Do you mean that a society where noone feels the need to keep secrets would be a healthier society than what we have today, or do you mean that forcing everyone to publish all their secrets against their will would lead to a healthier society? Or something else entirely?
> It's the one I advocate, because I believe more information is always better. You can certainly argue that it will be abused, but if everyone can see everything, then you can see the abuser doing the abuse as well. That's a key point that's easy to miss.
Well, the one problem is, of course, whether that is actually any more realistic than strong privacy. Just because you hope that more transparency of the powerless will also bring more transparency of the powerful, doesn't mean one actually implies the other. You can actually have total lack of privacy for common folk and total secrecy of the elite at the same time. With power come the resources to maintain secrecy, whether legal or not.
But maybe more importantly: Do you actually see the abuser doing the abuse? How would you actually find that out, in practical terms? Would you personally read all the data that's being published by the government? Millions of pages every day? After all, the more data, the better? Or wouldn't you, for the most part, have to rely on others, like journalists or activists, to filter out the interesting stuff and to put it into context for you? What do you expect powerful groups to do when they can clearly see how those journalists and activists are preparing to report on their wrongdoing? Just sit there and hope for the best, like, say, Putin or Erdogan?
> As to the diminished power, there's a similar argument to be made regarding wealth inequality. Hard to imagine the wealthy would agree to higher taxes if it hurts them, yet some of the most enlightened and even the very wealthiest do believe this, because they understand that while their individual wealth goes down if viewed in isolation, holistically, their true wealth goes up, because they improve the quality their country, its services, and the people they share their lives with.
The question is: Do you therefore want to give the wealthiest the power to write the tax code that's being enforced on everyone?
Do you think that because some people have good intentions with all the data that's being collected, anyone who manages to collect data should therefore have the right to override the wishes of the people the data is about?
If you want to find out whether something is risky, it's no use to only look at the successes. There absolutely have been monarchies where the monarch was a wise and responsible person. What does that tell us about whether monarchy or democracy should be the peferred form of government?
Ask anyone famous how hard it is to maintain a private life. It's much easier to go in the direction of transparency than backwards towards more privacy.
If you want to be more private, that means that no matter the level of encryption, you can never post your brutally honest thoughts in facebook or twitter or HN ever again. You can never let people know where you're visiting. What you're eating. What you're wearing. Who you're dating. You have to clam up. Because whether or not you've encrypted everything, you still leave fingerprints, not only in the IP addresses but in piecing together all the information you're sharing in order to home in on the identity of the poster.
It takes an enormous amount of effort to obfuscate your writing style and all your proper nouns, and it's not just effort. I think it costs you a piece of your humanity.
To answer your question about watching the abuser, if all information is broadcast (like literally broadcast openly on 802.11ac, for example), then in all likelihood, the people closest to the sources of these broadcasts are going to be the folks who can make the best use of the data. Too far away, and you won't even be able to pick up the signal. If someone further away can see value for reviewing it, then it's going to make sense to incentivize someone closer to archive and host it.
Putin and Erdogan get away with what they do because of asymmetric information. If their misbehaviour is similarly broadcast, then it levels the playing field.
And it changes journalism from being about leaking information and more about better analysis of information, its veracity, its implications, etc, as information would go from being valuable to being a commodity.
Right now, the wealthiest do appear to be writing the tax code.
And no, I do not think you should override the wishes of the people the data is about (within reason). That's central to my point. It turns knowledge into responsibility instead of power.
Correct me if I am wrong, but that boils down to "it's easier to publish your own information that to keep it secret", doesn't it?
How does that answer the question why you think that forcing the elite to be more transparent is easier than gaining/protecting the privacy of the common person?
Why is the eggshell defense of privacy an eggshell defense, but the enforced transparency of the elite is robust? (or is it?)
As far as I can tell, you are still simply assuming that enforcing transparency of the elite is comparatively easy, with no justification whatsoever, yet all of your argument seems to depend on that actually being true.
> Ask anyone famous how hard it is to maintain a private life. It's much easier to go in the direction of transparency than backwards towards more privacy.
I don't think that's actually accurate. There are plenty of famous people with a pretty private private life. There are many more factors at play when people's wealth is essentially in them being known, where "being known" necessarily implies that people know something about their private lives. The relationship between paparazzi and celebrities in particular is generally much more of a symbiosis than it's often being portrayed.
> It takes an enormous amount of effort to obfuscate your writing style and all your proper nouns, and it's not just effort. I think it costs you a piece of your humanity.
I am not sure what any of this has to do with the discussion at hand?!
> Putin and Erdogan get away with what they do because of asymmetric information. If their misbehaviour is similarly broadcast, then it levels the playing field.
So, Putin and Erdogan get away with killing and imprisoning journalists and shutting down newspapers only because there are no critical newspapers and journalists broadcasting their misbehaviour? Like, first there were no critical journalists and newspapers, and then Putin and Erdogan started killing and imprisoning and shutting down critical journalists and newspapers that didn't actually exist anyway? Could you explain?
> And it changes journalism from being about leaking information and more about better analysis of information, its veracity, its implications, etc, as information would go from being valuable to being a commodity.
Apart from the fact that it's still just a baseless claim of yours that that kind of transparency is in any way realistic to actually achieve: That's actually not as big a change as you make it out to be. It's akin to saying that building operating rooms in every school in the country would change medicine from being about having access to an operating room to being about performing a surgery. Millions of pages of government documents are about as useful to the public at large as operating rooms: Almost not at all. Without someone who has hard-earned specialized knowledge about how to use it, it might just as well not be there. The value comes from understanding the information, not from having overwhelming heaps of it at your fingertips. And the centralization that comes with the required expertise to be able to distill out the important bits comes the weakness where those in power can attack to keep information under control. If you put all surgeons in prison, the availability of operating rooms is of zero value to the public.
Or to put it more succintly: Just because books about everything that you could study at a university are readily available from amazon, in practice, not everyone is an expert in every academic field. Public availability of information does not automatically translate into the general public being well-versed in it by a long shot.
> Right now, the wealthiest do appear to be writing the tax code.
May I suggest you think about what the tax code would look like if it indeed were being written by the wealthiest? Just because it is giving the wealthiest an advantage doesn't mean it's as bad as it would be, were it to be written by the wealthiest.
> And no, I do not think you should override the wishes of the people the data is about (within reason). That's central to my point. It turns knowledge into responsibility instead of power.
Would you agree then that the state should protect the citizens' privacy and give them the legal tools to force others to respect their wishes?
I get the sense that I'm upsetting you, and I don't mean to do that. I'm sorry if I said something to offend. I want only to engage in an open discussion about this and to offer a different point of view. I believe in it very strongly, and I have given it a great deal of thought and even given talks on how to operate an economy within such a system. I by no means think it's foolproof, nor Utopian- just better.
I'm currently under deadline and a bit pressed for time, and I feel like we might have a more effective conversation over skype. Feel free to email me at advice@gmail.com if you'd like to swap contact info and chat about it further.
It's not that everything you say is wrong, but your conclusion crucially depends on this one central question of whether it is actually more effective at achieving the (implied) goal if you were to try and actually implement it, which seems highly questionable to me, but which you don't even acknowledge is your burden to show. You seem to assume that universal transparency is easier than universal privacy, and based on that you put forward arguments for why a transparent society would be better if it did exist. I might even agree with that conclusion based on that assumption. The part that's missing is how that applies in the real world, how that assumption is actually true in the real world--and my strong suspicion is that that's where your whole idea falls apart in practice, because you are simply ignoring how human psychology and power structures actually work, arguing instead from a completely unrealistic model of power structures that happens to support your conclusions.
I'm sure you believe it very strongly, and even that you have given it a great deal of thought. But have you tried to tear it apart? Do you know how to falsify your idea, do you know what it would take for you to accept that it's all wrong? If not, you might just be reinforcing your own biases without any connection to reality.
As for taking this outside HN, this is unfortunately a pseudonymous account, and as such, I don't connect it to any other identities. But feel free to take some time, chances are I will notice it ;-)
This is a claim you have provided no evidence for that flies in the face of the fourth amendment and property rights, not to mention natural rights. If you are wondering, John Locke would be a good starting point if you are truly interested in having the discussion needed on the subject.
"If you embrace privacy, you're also embracing their privacy, and you're reinforcing the increasingly asymmetric, and non-democratic advantage they have over you."
False, the government can be and is subject to the people, and therefore it's rights to privacy say, while in the duty of office, are much degraded. (see: FOIA) They are not the same.
Perhaps Y Combinator would care to share their IP access logs and tell you which servers appear to be scraping these posts? You could do it yourself, if only... oh yeah, privacy.
I look forward to FOIA-liberated records the NSA, HS, CIA, FBI, and local law enforcement agencies have on us. I also look forward to reading the FOIA-liberated transcripts of all the backroom deal-making where it seems the government is actually being governed from.
Do you think individual privacy helped bring us together as a nation to nominate the best candidates and elect the best President? Or do you think individual privacy helped us vilify each other in this election?
I agree that the privacy battle as we know it is already lost. Once someone has the kind of powers the "umpteen eyes" are possessing, no amount of legislation will make them give it up.
That does not mean we should pretend that it is not a problem. There is a massive discrepancy right now in the kind of tools and information that is publicly available, and what secret government operations are possessing.
What we should be fighting for is transparency, not privacy. I want to know exactly what kind of data is collected about me, and I want to know who accesses it and when (unless I'm subject to an investigation, during which the information about my data being accessed can be embargoed until it's over).
I would blog about this, if it wasn't so damn difficult to host a website without revealing my full identity. I don't want future employers to judge me for political views, sexuality or whatever. That's why privacy is important, and still will be in a fully-transparent world (which I do think is inevitable, but no government is currently working towards that).
I find when "transparency" is used in conversation these days, it tends to mean, "These guys over here shouldn't be allowed privacy, but I want to keep mine."
Increasing one will not reduce the other, or vice versa. As an example, imagine a scenario where everything the government does is in the open, and all systems can be publicly audited and verified. This is transparency, at no cost to privacy.
Conversely, if encryption, Tor, and leaving your house without a tracking device is outlawed, that would not increase transparency. It would merely make it more difficult to reduce the opacity of the receiving end of the tracking device.
Likewise, if you expect privacy in your personal life, but you work for the government and are forced to be transparent there, then using big data techniques and the many services tracking private individuals (uber, facebook, google, twitter, HN posts, others' cell phone captures, etc), you can suss out just about everything you need to know about their supposedly private lives, whether or not you know how to use Tor, can tolerate the dogshit Tor bandwidth and latencies, and assuming your Tor exit relays haven't been compromised.
When you create zones of privacy and transparency, what you're doing is making the private zone more powerful than the transparent zone, and you're making the transparent zone a liability to the private zone.
This is exactly the opposite of what you want to motivate. You want to generally motivate people to be transparent and to protect them for being transparent. Broadly speaking, that's the only way we're going to get more transparency. Right now in the US, transparency is generally equivalent to liability. It's all punishment, little reward.
I disagree, and if this is the starting assertion then we have a permanent disagreement that no amount of discussion can solve. Perhaps you could define "privacy". We must be using different definitions, as by my definition the fact that I do have privacy is as self-evident as the fact that only I know what I had for dinner.
What you had for dinner exactly is indeed "private" as you describe, but you see where I'm going with this? Your effective privacy is being pushed into a corner, because it's now possible with all of the little bits and pieces of clues you leave everywhere and the advent of big data to correlate these pieces into such a precise picture that your effective privacy is approaching zero over time.