I don’t think everything about you should be recorded without your consent. Privacy in your OWN person and documents is a major thing.
However, when you engage with another party and make promises, and then break them, the other party should have a way to prove what you said in a dispute. I think the default mode should not be “off the record”. Because most parties aren’t savvy enough to demand that you go “on the record” right before you talk. Instead, you can ask to go “off the record” so that will be the alert that none of your promises will matter during that period.
If being “on the record” is the default for all conversations, that’s what I’m talking about. The concept of “privacy” still applies to non-participants in the interaction.
The main question is, can we extend this expectation to other interactions not just conversations online? What if one of the participants had been carrying tiny body cameras and microphones, which has become more and more feasible to do?
You know how many rape crimes could be solved? Or police altercations? Imagine if everyone KNEW they were being recorded.
What if the cameras were not on the person’s body, but in the room? Surely we wouldn’t know, so the laws have to allow for it. But suppose we COULD legislate what these cameras did. One is to outlaw all cameras. The other is what if the video footage was always encrypted and it would require two keys:
1) M of N of the participants
2) a judge saying this is an active dispute / trial
It is in the interest of both parties to unlock the video once there is a court case, to help resolve what happened. Refusing to do so may be seen as an admission of guilt. The main reason for 1) is to allow people the option to be presumed guilty / held in contempt of court but not reveal the evidence against them. The problem is that they may be protecting some mob boss etc. so we may have to relax the condition 1) to just one of the parties. But recording entrapment still won’t be legal in two-party states.