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Comment by miguelrochefort | Hacker News Reader

The fact that we're starting to see people oppose the idea that "privacy is necessary at all cost" is comforting.

I'm really worried about the "solutions" that are starting to emerge to "fix" privacy. It's starting to look eerily like SOPA/PIPA.

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So how do you feel about internet privacy as a whole? I see a post like this and my reaction is, "I don't want everything I do to be public, intended or not" and in that case, I do want privacy. I know if I post a comment on a site, it doesn't go away. But at the same time, I don't want every single page, time, location, and overall history of my life accessible to large corporations. How do you remedy that with the current technical entrenchment in the economy and how it relates to eroding the choice of privacy from individuals? Pure anonymity and pure open-data for all will never work, so where is the balance?

You don't want to, but if someone strong enough gets interested in you, they can. You want privacy. I want privacy. But we don't and won't have any. Only very few and strong can afford that. "Protect privacy" has come to actually mean, protect the strong. We should abolish privacy for all. Not just the de facto, for us.

If you know you can't protect privacy, what makes you think you can abolish it for all?

Not only that, but why is it reasonable to remove the choice of privacy? That's the part that concerns me the most about these discussions, is the way "the internet" should either be all one way, or the complete opposite. That will never be realistic and I feel we should be focusing on the balancing act that works the best for the majority of use-cases.

How would you feel if there was a law that forced you to "forget" anything on request? I mean, did you get explicit consent to see and hear everything you saw and heard? Maybe this wouldn't be a big deal if you get 1-2 requests a year (assuming that forgetting on demand is possible), but what happens when you get millions?

Collecting data is easier than ever before. A lot of small businesses and individuals will start doing it. Can we expect all of them to be able to fulfill these kinds of requests? I'm sure it costs Google millions. This is not reasonable to expect this from anyone or anything.

Knowledge is inherently good. This is not what we should fight against. When bad things happen, the solution is to reduce incentives.

To the 3+ people downvoting me, please explain how I am not adding to the conversation / why you are downvoting.

It's the law of nature, human memory is not perfect.

I can not walk down a street and instantly run facial recognition on everyone, crosslink their FB/Twitter/etc accounts, analyze their text patterns, do NLP on their attitude for recent posts (to assess likely interaction responses), find their social graph of friends, interests, recent purchases, and so on ... as is, that is something that is unique to computers. I mean, it's like you've never heard of the Chilling Effect [1] or think that it's not a big deal, is that the case?

You still have not posted your full browser history from the previous post, why not? How can I be sure you're not trying to subvert the government, HN, or my opinion if you're not fully transparent with your entire life? As you said, "The effect of any "right to privacy" is coercive ignorance. It only really benefits dishonesty and secrecy." ... So again, if knowledge is good and so is transparency, I don't understand why you haven't posted your full browsing history.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect_(law)

In case you're wondering, I did not downvote you (I don't have enough points). But I will reply anyway.

I don't need to have all these "skills" to gain enough information about someone to be able to destroy its life. All I need is to witness something, and tell someone. Is it illegal to witness your male colleague wear a dress and tell others? Is it illegal to tell a friend he's being cheated on? Is it illegal to tell a kid Santa Claus doesn't exist? Should it?

The skills/tools you mention above don't have a qualitative effect on spreading knowledge. They just increase it quantitatively. My eyes won't catch so many things, but they still can catch enough information to have the same effect. And unless you argue that I should need explicit consent before I acknowledge and share anything I hear and see about a person, then I don't think it's reasonable to ban or limit access to tools that increase knowledge and transparency.

The chilling effect is very real. But is it really a bad thing?

I reached the same conclusion. Privacy is unsustainable, and it's unreasonable to expect it going forward.

It's only when you realize and accept this that you start seeing all the actual benefits of transparency.

The effect of any "right to privacy" is coercive ignorance. It only really benefits dishonesty and secrecy. Like any habit, it won't be easy to lose. But privacy is such a bad habit that we should seriously consider to tackle it.

As always, the first step is acceptance and recognition.

Please post your entire browsing history in full.

Just because he argues that privacy is unsustainable/sub-optimal doesn't mean that he has to facilitate its erosion. It is similar to how someone who demands privacy doesn't need to be prove his anonymity.

He is actively saying that privacy is a bad habit, but yet he won't demonstrate that he believes what he says by posting his history. Heck, all he has to do is screenshot (or copy/paste) everything from https://history.google.com/history to prove he's not "dishonest". And if "knowledge is inherently good" then it would be inherently good to know that he is not actively trying to subvert the government by browsing certain sites or reading certain books. It reads like someone drunk on idealism that believes information will never be distorted, used against them, misapplied, interjected with false data, and so on.

"doesn't mean that he has to facilitate its erosion"

It's not facilitating the erosion, it's adding evidence that what he says is backed up by fact, starting with himself. If he does not believe he should follow his own ideals, does he really believe them?

I cannot be sure, but I think he as arguing about it at societal level. This is my interpretation:

Given the technological improvements, privacy is unsustainable. If everyone realizes this and accepts it, we can reap the benefits of transparency. In a society that does not hold bad actions against those who already paid their due fine (or served the due time). Neither does that future society discriminate against people who are different. In that society, privacy will probably be beneficial only to the dishonest.

Now, I personally don't think if we can reach that stage of maturity, not anytime soon at least. But I think we are moving towards it faster than before and we are doing that because of the easy access to information especially the kind of information that we would otherwise keep private.

Right, I think that too and for the most part I agree. I have issue with the lack of those advocating for social-transparency to describe where the line is. Without having the serious conversation of where privacy and transparency are reasonably balanced, we're rushing into irrational decisions that have a long and lasting impact on society.

I have yet to see a single person who advocates for full transparency post their entire browser and search history, which to me feels odd. If they're advocating for full transparency and yet won't demonstrate that they themselves believe in the ideal enough to offer their own evidence and admission, I don't think they actually believe in those ideals fully, or more likely, have not articulated/discussed/discovered an appropriate middle-ground between these 2 concepts.

As much as I'd like not to have to hide anythings, society currently gives me no choice.

With the way society is currently designed, full personal transparency is pretty much social suicide.

Society was designed with some basic expectations of privacy. For example, we rely a lot on passwords and secrets to "prove" ownership and identity. Full transparencies implies that all my private keys, all my passwords, my credit card number, everything that is meant to be private is available to anyone. In a society that relies on no such concept of private knowledge, we wouldn't have this problem. But that's not the case right now.

The example above is just one reason why people shouldn't surrender their privacy just yet, and wait until the environment and context make it convenient. That said, we won't reach that state if we don't realize and accept that privacy is not we should rely on in the future. There are steps to take to make transparency practical and fair, and solutions like the ones mentioned in the above article are not any of them.

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