It's one of the rare instance where people can act completely irrationally (to the point of paranoia), and people will accept it as completely normal and expected.
I hope you realize how silly all of this will sound 20 years from now.
It's one of the rare instances where people can act as corporations of thousands of people will act in their long term interest and continue to do so indefinitely into the future with no oversight or transparency into their actions.
I hope you realize how silly all of this will sound 20 years from now.
Edit: This is obviously a parody of the parent comment. It doesn't absolutely reflect my views but I feel it is at least as valid a view as the parent. I do sometimes trust in certain places but I'm often uncomfortable and Google is one of the last companies I want to trust with massive amounts of personal information.
I don't give them access to information to keep it secure. They shouldn't even need permission to access it. I share information with the world to make it a better place. There's no point in living in the dark.
To keep information for yourself is selfish. To expect that others will keep it secret for you is foolish.
I'm in favor of complete transparency, and I do not favor individuals or corporations in that matter.
All these can be intimate personal details at times. They may provide information about health, sexual partners and activity. They can also reveal journalistic sources and high level company meetings that might give rise to insider trading.
Is this all information that should in your view be completely transparent.
That's great! Profit while it's still free. We'll soon have to pay to get businesses to track us.
> All these can be intimate personal details at times. They may provide information about health, sexual partners and activity. They can also reveal journalistic sources and high level company meetings that might give rise to insider trading.
All of these things are great too! What do you not see?
In case anyone is taking your position seriously Google don't necessarily share the information about you with you. Secondly in twenty years time when someone has obtained high office Google will still have the records of them visiting prostitutes/gay bars/anti-gay marriage events (whatever is disapproved of in 2035) and Google[0] or a disreputable employee[1] will blackmail them.
[0] Google 2014 obviously wouldn't do something so disreputable but give it 20 years of falling marketshare, decreasing quality of management and desperation and who knows where it might be.
[1] Likewise todays controls on data may be tight but who knows when they might be dismantled when they get in the way of profit.
Google should definitely share information concerning me with me (or information concerning anyone with everyone). But whether or not they do it shouldn't have any legal implication. They can be evil (as in not transparent) if they wish.
Whether or not large corporations that gather data about people (such as Google) are evil or not doesn't concern me. I would hold the same position if Skynet existed. They deserve this right just as much as anyone else.
It's a dead end because, if the average person can't do it, then strong privacy will forever be on the fringes of society, something only weirdos and techies are worried about. It'll be vulnerable to the 'if you don't have anything to hide [like me]...' arguments.
The answer is instead, I think, strong legal protections on personal information such that we can trust third parties with our information. That third parties are bound by consumer protection and privacy laws to only use the information in acceptable ways and only reveal the information under due process, such as court orders (sparingly given).
People who care about privacy should work with our legal and legislative systems, not against them.
However, I don't believe that regulation and laws are solution to anything. I also don't think that it's reasonable to expect entities, even large ones, to be 100% secure and keep your data secret at all time. Ultimately, I'm convinced that the world has MUCH MORE to gain from transparency than from privacy (secrecy).
Fundamentally, what makes you think that people actually should have a right to privacy? Where does that expectation come from, if not as a side-effect of inefficient communication? People believe that they're entitled to privacy, but I can't find any reasonable argument for it.
I don't see many people claiming their right to lie, their right to fraud, their right to steal. What makes privacy so different?
> I don't see many people claiming their right to lie, their right to fraud, their right to steal. What makes privacy so different?
Well, for one thing, privacy is neither immoral nor illegal. How are these things even related?
You don't own yourself. Everything you do is an interaction with the world (including your own body and mind), which belongs to everyone equally.
Whether or not the imperfect beings we are want to hide things from others doesn't justify it to be right. People want to keep things private because they gain something from it. There's a lot of things I want from this world, but society don't hand them to me in the form of a fundamental right.
> Well, for one thing, privacy is neither immoral nor illegal. How are these things even related?
Says who? I would argue that privacy is actually immoral. Above all, though, what's immoral is to make illegal any non-coercive acquisition of data. Making that illegal is the real mistake here. And I don't suggest we make privacy illegal, that wouldn't be possible.
This is an extreme view. How can we even begin to talk about desires and rights under this assumption? If I don't own myself, how can I own anything? We have to throw out the idea of property, the concept of theft and so on. Is murder even wrong in this context?
Of course.
> Is murder even wrong in this context?
Murder is not wrong. Murder is just an action that reflects a decision. Whether it's good or not depends entirely on whether the outcome is optimal or not. Murder is not qualitatively different from, say, breaking a window. The only difference is one of quantity and scale. Generally, much more time and energy is invested in a living person than in the creation and installation of a window.