Privacy is a fundamental human right!
No sane person believes that there aren't really nasty, organized criminals in the world, and no sane person believes that said criminals have a right to absolute privacy, including e.g. (the moral equivalent of) search warrants.
I grew up in a time/place where organized crime was rampant, and if you looked at the wrong person you could be killed. It was time of racism-by-default, thievery-by-default, a lack of investment in R&D, science or infrastructure, and the opposite of a meritocracy. It was an "invasion" of their privacy that ended that era, and now we can comfortably watch Scorcese movies about it over an internet those people would never have invented or invested in.
That's just a strawman.
Plenty of sane people believe that the threat of criminals doesn't outweigh the threat to individual liberty posed by the state. Additionally, plenty of sane people wouldn't support a ban on locks and safes because it makes it harder to search criminals.
I'm pretty sure I have my sanity in check, and I don't think there's any reason for the government to require private enterprise to break encryption to ease prosecution. It should be hard or impossible for governments to spy on their citizens.
Can you expand upon how the advancements in western society since (say) WWII have been neccesarily dependant upon privacy?
Alan Turing. Hell, Tim Cook, a gay man who grew up in Alabama. Neither would have survived childhood with their personalities intact had their governments had the access No. 10 Downing demands.
Privacy preserves society’s margins. The margins, by definition, are where change—growth—is nurtured.
However your examples don't demonstrate how the many advances in western society depend upon privacy nor do they prove that it would not have advanced without privacy.
Alan Turing, for example, was open about his sexuality (an issue that bit him when a robbery took place long after his work at Bletchley).
Even had he been somehow taken out of the picture pre WWII it remains true that Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski would still have cracked the Enigma cipher, built the prototype Bombe's and passed that knowledge to the likes of Tommy Flowers and William Thomas Tutte.
Turing proved a result applicable to the third part of Hilbert's second problem, the Entscheidungsproblem.
He was very nearly beaten to that as a first by Kurt Gödel who provided an answer to the first two parts of Hilbert's second while indicating an approach to the third part.
Turing was beaten to the goal by Alonzo Church who demonstrated the halting problem for lambda calculus is not effectively calculable.
Later, in 1939 J. Barkley Rosser highlighted the essential equivalence of "effective method" defined by Gödel, Church, and Turing.
So, uhh, yes - it would be nice to see some notion of proof come to in to play here.
Fringe elements are analogous to a society's surface. They, by definition, interact with novel elements and ideas at a higher rate than population.
Internal interactions exchange information. That distributes information (physical and intellectual). It also increases entropy and thus homogeneity. Conductivity (the term of art is legibility [1]) and complexity are at odds with one another.
Ceteris paribus, internal homogeneity shouldn't change the surface. But humans have agency. Homogeneity precedes conformity which drives more homogeneity. Furthermore, less diversity means fewer novel opportunities/interactions between the fringe and the unknown.
Privacy preserves a diversity of fringes which drives social complexity. A society without privacy is simpler, and thus less capable of innovation, than one with it. (There is obviously an upper bound to this phenomenon. A perfectly opaque system is static. But humans, as social creatures, resist isolation more naturally than conformity.)
[1] https://publications.aston.ac.uk/id/eprint/27204/1/Linked_da...
2. Privacy is about as personal of a fight to Cook as shareholder obligations are, and only one of them gets him removed if he neglects it.
3. It's pretty fucking stupid to suggest the UK would do the same thing to Turing today if they had the data. You may recall that there are now laws in both the UK and, yes, Alabama since 2009, that render this a hate crime and deter it properly. It's the lamest possible excuse to support corporate power.
Ultimately Tim Cook will say whatever gets investors horny. If you're dumb enough to factor his sexuality in to your trust quotient, you deserve to be XKeyscored.
A series of examples isn't necessarily a comparison and is certainly not an equation.
> stupid to suggest the UK would do the same thing to Turing today
Re-read the comment. Nobody suggested as much.
If we ignore the open society angle and assume surveillance would be one sided:
Competition is needed for healthy capitalist economies. Competition doesn't work well with great power imbalances. To the extent entrenched business could leverage the government, as they do, powers of surveillance could be used to stifle competition. That leads to stagnation.
Democracy, even in a limited form, doesn't work when everyone is under surveillance by a powerful minority. I don't think I need to elaborate since there's been plenty of writing on that.
Also, people don't want to make civic contributions to a society that treats them like cows with a criminal bent. There's not much argument against being a hedonic leech in a society that benefits from your labor but resents your autonomy.
I haven't answered your question exactly, but it's a bit difficult when framed that way. I still think it's pretty clear that the massive power imbalance that comes with dragnet surveillance can catalyze corruption, stagnation, and malaise, thus impeding progress.
I suspect what many forget or were perhaps unaware of is the in practice society with near zero privacy existed for the vast bulk of actual human history.
Before the car and the radical change in individual human movement that came about for those parts of the world privileged enough to have a car for every family the majority of people lived within a small radius surrounded by people who effectivel knew every detail of each others lives .. if not as it happened then almost certainly by the next quarter as word spread.
Again, as I mentioned above, I like privacy .. but it remains true that the greatest expansions of modern western economies; mass production, feeding quantitively more with less land and labour, etc .. all happened without any essential dependance upon privacy to bring these changes about.
It is the upstream grandparent claim that privacy is fundemental and essential for any advancement in a society that doesn't pass the smell test and certainly hasn't yet been well argued for.
I absolutely do agree that it is desirable .. but essential (in a strict sense) for the continuation of human society .. that needs better argument to pass muster.
The lack of privacy in a local town is surely quite different in its effect on society than a centralized and wide reaching dragnet surveillance program. That local lack of privacy was limited in reach, not automatic nor persistent, and mostly symmetric... which doesn't present the same potential harms.
With no privacy there’s no civil disobedience and no advancement.
Without privacy there’s no resistance to Putin’s regime, or to prohibition (of abortion, homosexuality, alcohol, drugs, …).
Privacy is essential.
I'm a bit curious how you arrived at the conclusion that you're "not sure our species has a fundamental right to [privacy]". That seems like the absurd claim requiring actual support here, seeing as how privacy is the norm, not the other way around.
I didn't claim anything, I said I wasn't sure. Our species is much much older than the concept of privacy. Back when we were still sitting in trees there was no privacy. We decided that that was a thing quite a bit later. Now in the year 2023 I would say many of us see privacy as a fundamental human right though obviously and a privilege to defend.
The very concept natural rights is basically divine rights but without explicitly mentioning a god.
As such, it's much more likely that they are universally true rather than a result of human consensus.
Care to elaborate on your thinking? Genuinely interested.
One more example: some societies will require you to disclose any relation to politically exposed persons. Which is beneficial to society, but I can’t withhold even if I wanted.
As the famous saying goes: There are no solutions, only trade-offs.
Privacy is a trade-off.
The only place where privacy has meaning is in the company of other people. Including society as a kind of group of people.
Here lies the paradox.
(Russia was finally kicked out after continuing what they started in 2014, but their pledge was a joke anyway, or wishful thinking at best).