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> Only criminal and highly unethical activity will be negatively affected.

Because nobody has ever suffered for being outed as LGBT, minority religion or political party, etc.? Losing a job, being beaten or killed go way beyond embarrassment and those outcomes are a given for millions of people.

Many people like their various bigotries – whole religions feed on the social dynamics of saying everyone outside is sinful and trying to corrupt you – and while it'd be nice if revealing secrets lead to greater tolerance I'd bet a lot that the more likely outcome would be rage that they'd been infiltrated and purging anyone who had been keeping secrets.

Yeah but a lot of people who are currently pretending to be straight or even homophobic might actually be closeted themselves or they may have some real dirt on them.

Your boss won't fire you for being gay if it turns out that they themselves are closeted or if they are laundering money, avoiding taxes or doing drugs, etc... Or even if your boss is in fact a very simple perfectly-behaved person, then 90% of employees in the company will have something potentially embarrassing about them and they're not going to fire 90% of the company.

The higher you go up the ranks of society, the more dirt you will find.

And the beauty of it is that people who are higher up the ranks will be uncovered first (due to public demand). The researchers didn't go after just anybody, they specifically looked up a politician and a judge. These are the natural targets; people who are supposed to represent and uphold society's moral ideals.

Hate to say it, but this is a rather naive perspective on human behavior and interaction. Like the GP said, the threat goes far beyond losing a job. For just one example, it is a very sad fact that transgender individuals face significantly higher rates of domestic violence, sexual violence, and stranger assault, especially trans individuals of color. More broadly, maybe it's true that fully outing all (or most, or many) closeted LGBTQ individuals would force faster societal change in the long term, but the short term effects may not be worth it, and anyway, I really don't think that decision should ever be in the hands of anyone other than the individuals themselves.

"Only criminal and highly unethical activity will be negatively affected."

Such as whistleblowing, investigative journalism, and union organizing?

Don't forget that being gay was on that list fairly recently and civil rights were on that list in recent history.

Society changes.

I deliberately didn't give historical examples, because I think many people dismiss them as "Oh but that was in the past - we know better now, and there's no chance of that repeating." - they feel too distant, almost abstract.

And honestly, I mostly think they'll probably turn out to be correct - for those specific cases, for their countries. What I think will happen is some new group will be targeted - political, social, or ethnic. People that shouted a bit too loud at G20 protests, or condemned US involvement in the middle east too harshly, or published cracks for DRM.

To convince them, you have to give examples of things that are at risk right now. Show them the gun pointed at their head, not the abandoned gunpowder refinery nearby, and tales of how it might start up again.

> And honestly, I mostly think they'll probably turn out to be correct - for those specific cases, for their countries. What I think will happen is some new group will be targeted

The current trend globally is for discrimination against LGBTQ to increase...

> globally

That's why I said 'for their countries'. In most of the West, LGBTQ discrimination is decreasing. Because if you look globally, then all sorts of innocent people are at risk , and the need for privacy is obvious - look at China or Russia. But the people making 'nothing to hide' arguments live in the here and now - sure, gays might need privacy in Russia, but we're not Russia lol

Yeah but if people had known earlier about how widespread homosexuality was - They would have realised how little it means in the context of all the other stuff that people do; it would have been accepted sooner.

I think there's unfortunately examples where something being reasonably widespread did not stop it from being persecuted heavily.

"...I look forward to everyone's information being made public in the future..."

One of the problems is that everyone's information will not become public, and that asymmetry MIGHT lead to social power imbalances. A good "for instance" is that using some of the techniques outlined in the article, a person who might have had the discipline to never start using any social media sites would be part of that 5% of people that you could not identify.

Every technique will have holes like that, and it will give some people a level of privacy that others don't have. And that's where even mundane things you would normally not even think about, begin to get affected by the social power imbalances. For instance, a company receives 2 resumes, one from me, one from someone who is "digitally invisible". (For lack of a better term.) The background check they run on me would be a whole lot more detailed than the check they run on the "digitally invisible" person. I guess the answer to that is for me to just not be a douche on the internet.

At any rate, I don't know if I'm being clear, but I hope you can see where techniques like this could expose one person, but not another. It's not really "fair" in the way you described unless everyone is exposed.

Why would you want everyone's information made public? Do you see any value in anonymous (or semi-anonymous) discussions?

It's possible they were led by utopian thinking. For example, I'd love a society where everyone knows everything about everyone but just doesn't care what weird ideas and preferences they have. But I also expect that no society that hasn't been telepathic since it's dawn would be work as well as the idea goes ;)