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Comment by ergothus | Hacker News Reader

Author David Brin has (relatively) long advocated that we have two options: shoot for privacy resulting in those with power able to access the "private" info, or have it open where everyone can access. He then argues for the latter because it minimizes rather than maximizes abuse. (I'm paraphrasing and summarizing, possibly poorly)

I struggle with being _comfortable_ with that idea, but I don't have a problem believing the technical accuracy of it.

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Interestingly (because the parent is about Schneier). IIRC Schneier argues against this.

The argument is that even if everybody has access to all information, only a small group is able to exploit that access effectively.

So, you still end up with a small group abusing their access to the information. You should therefore aim for privacy of sensitive information.

Yeah, I think a good example of this is thinking about something like license plate scanning.

Technically, this is not taking advantage of any public information. It is just capturing images of things happening in public. Anyone could set up a camera and capture license plates as they drive through an intersection.

So is it totally fine for a police force to scan license plates at every intersection?

The question is complicated, because the effect on people changes when you do something that is not worrisome on a small scale in an automated way at a large scale. When you add in that the people doing it have a large amount of power over people and it changes it even more.

Well hold on, the difference there is the police can cross reference scanned plates against other databases the public doesn't have access to, yeah? Or is there some way to id plates against names? If there is I wanna know cause I wanna ID whoever knocked my motorcycle over

If you had near continuous location information for a license plate it would be relatively simple to use it to narrow it down to a small group of people.

I’d imagine it would be relatively easy to figure out where someone works and/or lives and just go find them.

Correlating across multiple public databases might make things even easier.

But I don’t think this is the point of the argument. The point is that those in power can gain more benefit from the information than the general population.

Let’s say all votes in elections become public. That information is more useful to a powerful political party than to the public at large, or a small unfunded group. If you don’t want that information abused, the argument goes, you should make sure it’s kept private.

In practice, the forced revelation of information makes individual privilege and power more important. When everyone has to play with their cards on the table, so to speak, then people who feel like they can be themselves without consequence do so freely -- these generally being people with support groups of like-minded people, and who are neither economically nor physically vulnerable. People who are more vulnerable to consequences use concealment as a method of protection: it makes it possible to speak freely about controversial subjects, or even about any subjects, without fear of harassment.

-- Yonatan Zunger, chief architect, Google+

https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/WegYVNkZQqq

For anyone curious for more information, Dr. Brin's largest work on the subject is the non-fiction collection of essays called The Transparent Society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society

Published in 1998, I think it's probably still the most fascinating work on privacy of the post-internet age.

More fun fictional explorations of the subject can be found in his novels Kiln People and Earth.

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