Hacker News Reader

Here's a real issue. It's not the existence of porn, it's the nature of the porn. If you've decided you want to attack someone, and if they have even remotely unusual tastes, you can certainly attack based on those.

If it's really a low status taste (e.g., furry, femdom, cuckold), the attacks write themselves. If it's more mainstream, it isn't hard to twist it into something deeply revealing about their character (e.g., "omfg look at how he objectifies asians").

Here is a real life example of this, albeit not based on privacy leaks but on something I chose to reveal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7945286

Without disagreeing with your observation, as a practical matter the biggest influence is how one responds to the allegations. I remember a few years ago it emerged that a US Senator not only patronized prostitutes, but that his preferred sexual fetish supposedly involved wearing diapers (which is a pretty fringe preference, to at least the same degree as those you mention). Embarrassing of course, especially as it was his second prostitution-related scandal in a decade, but he made the usual tearful public apology to his wife on TV followed by a reaffirmation of his religious faith and bingo, forgiven. His party didn't want to lose a Senate seat if he resigned, and he's since been re-elected and is this year planning to run for governor of his home state.

To say "privacy vs. progress of mankind, pick one" is rather naive and not helpful.

If you take the aspect of watching gay porn alone: people will lose their jobs over this if their boss is conservative or they work for a conservative institution. People will lose their families or be beaten up or killed for that in fundamentalist societies or regions. Look at russia, the middle east, african countries.

And even if sexual orientation would be no problem at all in our society, perhaps in five or ten years from now that may change. All over europe right-wing political movements are rising and in the USA, well...

So, it's great that you have no problem. And yes, people should be more relaxed about watching porn. But in reality they aren't, and the decision whether someone wants other people to know about his sexual preferences or orientation has to be his and his alone.

Privacy is a human right and it's _important_. Technology should aid people in every way possible to guard their privacy, their dignity and their personal choices. To hold this as a value is not going against the progress of mankind. In fact, it's relatively easy to change technology and there is no reason at all not to do it.

e: english grammar

> If you take the aspect of watching gay porn alone: people will lose their jobs over this if their boss is conservative or they work for a conservative institution. People will lose their families or be beaten up or killed for that in fundamentalist societies or regions. Look at russia, the middle east, african countries.

I know, and I agree that having porn habits suddenly public worldwide will cause short-term problems there (though one could argue that sudden reveal of how common some preferences are could also force their societies to reconcile official values with reality).

> So, it's great that you have no problem. And yes, people should be more relaxed about watching porn. But in reality they aren't, and the decision whether someone wants other people to know about his sexual preferences or orientation has to be his and his alone.

Well, for one, part of the progress of mankind is people being more relaxed (that seems to be the only stable solution with good cost/benefit tradeoff).

But in general, the very notion of being able to be private seems misguided. If you really want to make revealing someone's sexual preferences his and his alone decision, you'd have to reduce human interactions to text-only chat.

Scratch that - even that wouldn't help, you could always infer stuff from prolonged conversation.

The point is, we really suck at hiding anything and it makes no sense to limit our ability to perceive and interpret the world to perserve a flawed notion of "private information".

> Privacy is a human right and it's _important_.

I'm not convinced. We give up a lot of privacy to form a society.

> (though one could argue that sudden reveal of how common some preferences are could also force their societies to reconcile official values with reality).

Fundamentalists don't care for statistics and they usually aren't very open to new ideas. Besides if they would have lists of people watching gay porn, they'd probably have a minority anyway.

> If you really want to make revealing someone's sexual preferences his and his alone decision, you'd have to reduce human interactions to text-only chat.

Of course not. Gay people in countries where they are oppressed have to hide their sexual orientation and they succeed with that. And in more open societies people decide for themselves whether they want to 'come out' to others or not. Nobody has the right to take that decision from them.

If this decision is taken away from them, it may destroy their life. And if that happens because their browsers didn't guard their privacy, the technology sucks.

> We give up a lot of privacy to form a society.

No, our society is based on the individuals' privacy. That is why we vote in secrecy and why we value a persons' liberty.

Privacy doesn't mean that everything I do is a secret. It means that I have the right to choose what I want to be a secret and what not. And I should be able to count on that, since it's a human right.

Take a look at what happens in reality. People are killed all over the world for their beliefs, their political opinions, their sexual orientation. Peoples lifes depend on their privacy. It that is taken away from them, that is totalitarianism.

This is a strong point in favour of privacy. I don't feel I have much to add at this point in conversation, I need to think about this issue more. Thanks for elaborating :).

> That is why we vote in secrecy

Just to address this one thing though - from what I understand, we vote in secret so that we can't be forced to vote against our will by external actors via e.g. blackmail - not because we value privacy per se. Am I wrong here?

> Just to address this one thing though - from what I understand, we vote in secret so that we can't be forced to vote against our will by external actors via e.g. blackmail - not because we value privacy per se. Am I wrong here?

No, you're right. But I'd say that we implicitly value the privacy of the voting booth as a tool to guarantee a free election.

Thanks for thinking about this. :)

Privacy is not secrecy. It's not a secret what I do when I go to the toilet. However, I do want my privacy when I'm in there. Understand the difference?

I do. Though I think it's something curable by rejection therapy, given by the popularity of urinals in public places. Anyway, I keep thinking about a different but related thing.

Are you, or were you ever religious? A lot of people are, and probably majority were in the past. Pretty much every mainstream religion teaches that there is an all-seeing god who watches you all the time. And that includes being watched while in toilet. Or while in bed with your spouse. So I wonder - if people were used to be watched by an omnipotent god, how is that different from being watched by omnipotent cloud?

For the record, I haven't in any way made my mind about the issue. I am just exploring the concept that maybe we don't need as much privacy as most think we need, and maybe it would be better for the whole mankind to limit those expectations.

> if people were used to be watched by an omnipotent god, how is that different from being watched by omnipotent cloud?

That's an interesting meta point which is much wider than this discussion (it also encompasses PRISM etc)

But plenty of us don't believe in the omnipotent God, and most of those that do don't expect Him to adversely affect their every day life by forwarding on their browsing history to their spouse, the local newspaper or the police.

> That's an interesting meta point which is much wider than this discussion (it also encompasses PRISM etc)

Fair enough, though I don't think I ever saw that meta point being touched in any of the discussions about recent privacy issues, and I wish it had - it seems to be important for the future of mankind.

> most of those that do don't expect Him to adversely affect their every day life

To be honest, a lot of the stuff we want to be "private" about probably wouldn't adversely affect our daily lives as well. For instance, if I were to be discriminated by my employer for being a Trekkie (because everyone who cares can know everyone elses fandom affiliations), that employer would be doing himself a big disservice by dismissing potentially good people because of irrelevant criteria and will be outcompeted by one who doesn't discriminate (unless he wants to create a Star Wars-oriented workplace to improve cohesion and morale; let the market decide then if this actually makes sense).

The only big objection I can see is with insurance - while on the one hand I'd be totally fine for insurance companies to bill people by their risky behaviour, it would have nasty consequences for health-related policies; having access to medical data makes insurance more expensive for people who need it the most. But I suppose there could be workarounds.

> Either way, it's another data point for "privacy vs. progress of mankind, pick one".

I read The Circle recently and thought "no one could possibly go for this". And yet here we are already in 2015

I don't want to spoil the book too much for myself, but from a cursory check I infer that this comment was meant to be a criticism.

My point is, if one stops treating the vague notion of "privacy" as some kind of end-goal and focuses on costs and benefits, it seems reasonable that we might be losing more than we are gaining as a civilization by fighting for as much "privacy" as possible.

I agree. It's so much easier not to worry about this stuff. It's normal.