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Comment by Litost | Hacker News Reader

This might well be the dumbest thing i've ever said on the internet, but extrapolating from "data on 7% of americans just got hacked" to the premise nothing is actually secure

a) What would happen if we embraced this and just made all information freely available?

b) Is one of the likely/possible end or transitional states of the human race, all information being freely available and presumably along with it, a more enlightened approach to dealing with it?

c) Are there any good sci-fi books where this is explored?

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The 7% of Americans in question are a big, big deal. In an old-school Cold War context, this sort of thing would be considered nothing short of apocalyptic.

To answer your question, check out David Brin's original writings on "The Transparent Society." If this material were to be leaked in public, it would almost constitute a field trial of his thesis. It would take a serious act of restraint on the Federal government's part not to pull the plug on the whole Internet, or at least every plug they can reach.

Interesting idea.

I think in a hypothetical situation where everyone had total info awareness you could make it work. If somebody uses your info to steal your identity or something, you'd know who it was and they would open themselves up to reprisal. Some equilibrium would be reached.

In the real world though, releasing 'everyone's' data wouldn't really do anything to protect any given person if somebody wanted to specifically target them and you also wouldn't know who perpetrated it so really you have a system in place that rewards the bad actors.

> Are there any good sci-fi books where this is explored?

Marshall Brain's Manna[0]. It goes into the recursive effects of "anytime anyone accesses information, that access is publicly logged" as well.

Though in my view the story hasn't held up very well over the past 12 years, compared to great scifi with similar tropes, such as Egan's Permutation City[1] or older Stephenson. In some ways that's due to a less intense writing style; in other ways it's due to parts that have essentially come true, making them seem retrospectively like "bad scifi".

Egan's description of mind-merging in Closer[2] might also be of some interest, as it explores the conceptual overlap between intimacy and real-time mutual information access.

[0] http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City

[2] http://eidolon.net/?story=Closer&pagetitle=Closer&section=fi...

You might be interested in The Circle by Dave Eggers.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18302455-the-circle

" What would happen if we embraced this and just made all information freely available?"

Included in that 7% of the OPM data theft: Intelligence applications, their private data (names, DOB, medical & psych evaluations), interviews of referees, personal information and possibly assessments.

This is a serious breach.

I've been a big supporter of total transparency for a while now. I probably have a hundred posts and comments about this very topic on HN and Reddit alone. My experience is that most people won't even consider the idea. Those who don't just assume it's trolling usually ask the same question: "Post your name, address, email address, phone number, social security number, credit card number, passwords here." and they believe it constitutes a valid argument. That's laughable.

Privacy only rewards liers and cheaters, and generally unreliable people. It leads to a world where kids tell their teachers what they want to hear, where politicians tell the population what they want to hear, where job candidates tell the interviewer what he wants to hear. You can't cheat, lie, manipulate and generate bullshit? Sorry, but that's an handicap in today's society.

We live in a world where it's expected of people to keep secrets and conceal the truth. It's your job to keep your house keys safe, keep your password safe. Wear clothes, makeup, wigs, get plastic surgeries if you need to. Never talk about your flaws, only share successes. You can't ask for help publicly, that would reveal you're imperfect. Keep it in, live in the closet. Oh, and be a white male.

Don't forget, one picture of you being drunk or smoking a joint, and your political carrier is over. I mean, the absence of such a picture would convince anyone that such a thing never happened.

The correlation between reality and what's publicly available is so ridiculously thin, that nobody really knows what truth is. And that's a bit scary.

I see people avoid using smartphones because "NSA". I see people browsing behind 7 proxies. I see people wasting considerable amount of time setting up encryption on everything they touch. Better delete my Facebook account right?

We will never win this race. It's unsustainable to try to keep that much information private. Technology favors entropy. It's time to embrace transparency.

>We will never win this race. It's unsustainable to try to keep that much information private. Technology favors entropy. It's time to embrace transparency.

How much transparency are you advocating for?

Privacy isn't just about protecting secrets. For instance, it can be inferred that married couples have sex in their bedrooms. That's not a secret. But if you ask them if you can plant a camera in their bedroom for the purposes of recording their sex lives, they would most certainly reject.

Are you advocating for transparency for facts, or transparency on everything?

> But if you ask them if you can plant a camera in their bedroom for the purposes of recording their sex lives, they would most certainly reject.

Of course they would reject. They've been brainwashed to think this is bad. And so was society. That will have to change.

I'm advocating total transparency. Everything.

When my sickly widowed grandmother makes a fruit cake for me, and asks me if I like it, I tell her yes. In your world, I'd have to tell her no. That's total transparency.

If people were truly good, total transparency would happen naturally. People wouldn't keep secrets because that's simply not the right thing to do. But that doesn't happen. People don't always do the right thing, and forcing total transparency won't stop that.

You could make the same arguments for having locks on doors. It would be nice if we lived in a society where we did not need them. When we have that society, we will have transparency too, but until then, I'm keeping my doors locked and my information encrypted.

You think that's optimal to lie to your grandmother?

People will stop lying when honesty and trust becomes the currency. And it will.

Thee is a change to western society that has been happening, but it is not the zero-privacy dystopia you are advocating for. The west is rather quickly transforming from a guilt bait's social norms from the guilt society[1] into a face (or shame) society[2].

> People will stop lying

I don't[3]. I already have a hard enough time remembering everything, and lies would only add to the crap I have to remember. Please don't assume everybody lies OR that "not lying" is anything close to the same set as "no privacy". Just because I tell the truth doesn't mean I don't maintain privacy for a variety of reasons.

The zero-privacy society you are advocating for has real world consequences to thing like racism, LGBT issues, and the like. Assuming that people wouldn't behave in these antisocial ways is delusional at best, because it presupposes that people act anywhere close to rationally. Wore, you have to remember that modern technology means that anything recorded sticks around ~forever. You are advocating for a society where people dig up ancient skeletons in someone's close just because they can. This is not hypothetical - an obvious example are the people in ?chan culture where bored teenagers SWAT[4] people "for the lulz"[5] It is laughable to think that that this kind of behavior will magically go away with more cameras.

In a society where every mistake you have ever made is recorded and available for critique is a society with extreme risk-avoidance (ass-covering) policies. The closet thing to this totally-open society we have today are the extreme forms of Calvinism (xian strict predestination) and the perverse incentive it creates to cover up and ignore problems.

Above all that, though, is the effect a lack of privacy has on experimentation and innovation: when people know they are being watched, they tend to not take risks or do things that make them stand out too much. This isn't just a Human behavior, either, as most mammals have similar reactions. You seem to see this effect as a good thing, while ignoring that private experimentation is a key part of how children grow and learn. Even into adulthood a lack of privacy raise stress and other mental health problems.

In a few hundred years, if society has learned to handle race, sexuality, poverty, mental health, and many of the other problems that cause the animosity, hatred, and violence we see today, we might be able to consider a are more open society. Until that time, an "open" society has real consequences for a lot of people. If you want to make such a future happen faster, I suggest you spend your efforts on actually trying to fix some of these problems, instead of assuming that everybody lives in a similar situation to your so you can pretend that hatred, racism, sexism, are just "brainwashing" that will magically go away if we could just get a camera into every bedroom.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt_society

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shame_society

[3] I will add that while I have never had to test the extreme limits of "not lying", I have walked away from a job over a "lie or street" situation ( http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LieOrStreet ).

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiW-BVPCbZk

[5] http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-did-it-for-the-lulz

You won't have to remember that people cheat or lie. The currency system takes care of it.

Lying is a crime. Refusing to communicate is an hindrance. Fortunately, the incentives for being transparent will far out-weight any benefit privacy could provide.

Privacy is why racism and LGBH issues exist in the first place. Tolerance sets in very quickly when constantly exposed to reality.

Likewise, privacy sustains the need to hide skeleton in the closet and conceal past mistakes. When everyone is exposed, it just becomes commonplace and they're not that remarkable anymore. If anything, it will be easier to understand why and how mistakes happen, and we'll be able to reduce their occurrence significantly. Today, the worst problems/mistakes are those people are working the hardest to conceal. Don't you see how that's a problem?

Privacy doesn't cure the underlying fear of being exposed. It gives you a sensation of safety in a society that's inherently broken. No wonder shameless people are so successful. Privacy, again, is the cause of that imbalance. Get rid of privacy, and people will start accepting the imperfect person they are.

I'm not advocating a complete switch today. I need people to understand that privacy is not a sustainable long-term solution, and that we need to make important changes to society that will facilitate the eventual switch to total transparency. It's not like you have a choice, transparency will be imposed on you whether you want it or not. The sooner you take steps to facilitate and embrace the switch, the easier and smoother the process will be.

A good analogy for that is fossil fuel. I don't suggest that everyone switch to electric cars today, but we have to take steps to prepare for an eventual switch. Like privacy, we can only use so much fossil fuel before it's gone.

Tolerance sets in very quickly when constantly exposed to reality.

Alternatively, those who are unacceptably different to the majority are exterminated. I don't think I like that.

>That's laughable.

How is it laughable to expect you to practice what you preach? Particularly given your very next sentence in which you state privacy only rewards liers and cheaters, and generally unreliable people. You leave no room there for the possibility that privacy is anything but an immoral act.

So which is it? are you a liar, a cheater, and generally unreliable, or do you simply, rationally not want people to empty out your bank account?

Explain your hypocrisy and maybe people will take you more seriously. If it's simply a fact that there is no system of absolute transparency in place and, currently, privacy has practical value then that would seem to contradict the absolute terms in which you frame your own narrative. Would it not be better to recognize that there are situations for which personal privacy can have benefits to society and not look forward to throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

There is a big difference between a world in which privacy is difficult and one in which it's impossible by mandate. Advocating the latter as being not only good, but inevitable, sounds fascistic, because it would have to be forced onto people, and maintained by violence. I will never voluntarily choose to live in such a world, so someone will have to make it illegal to put locks on my doors and passwords on my personal accounts. They will have to force me to live in a world where the choice to do otherwise is impossible, because that kind of a system isn't necessarily an inevitable outgrowth of technological progress.

I'm being extremist for the sake of argument and consistency. I don't recommend you go out and live a completely transparent life today when the rest of society is not ready. So many things in today's society rely on some expectation of privacy, which currently makes the transition impractical. An example of that is private key cryptography.

Although not very good at it, my purpose here is to bring awareness to the unsustainable nature of privacy, and demonstrate some benefits of transparency. I want people to adopt a long-term outlook and eventually reach these conclusions themselves. I've been thinking about that a lot, playing the devil's advocate for both sides, and I honestly can't see anything good coming from this reliance on privacy. I have some trouble understanding how that's not obvious to more people.

Many people on HN are looking for problems to solve, but have trouble finding them. I've often claimed that problems are some of the easiest things to find, and I'll show you an example here. Privacy is like a band-aid. It doesn't solve the underlying cause of problems. It just makes the problem go away, out of sight out of mind. It quickly became the go-to way to fix non-trivial problems, usually through some kind of law enforcement. Exactly like SOPA/PIPA, patents, copyrights, and censorship in general. I don't know why these things have different names, because they're all exactly the same things. And I mean exactly.

When privacy is hypothetically removed, people come up with a ton of potential problems. Private key encryption is one of them ("people will know your password"). The business opportunity here would be to to allow authentication, prevent fraud, and maybe secure systems without the use of password or secret keys. I said "maybe" because we probably should re-evaluate the concept of private property in the first place (which could reduce our reliance on security, for example).

I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If you understand privacy as being intrinsically valuable, then it might look like it. But my argument goes beyond that. My claim is that privacy has no intrinsic value, and is actually evil. I'm not giving up on privacy because it's too hard, I'm actively trying to get rid of it. Even if we had some magic that would lead to perfect security and privacy, I would advocate against it.

Let's make something else clear. I value freedom enormously, and I'm strictly opposed to coercion. Nobody will be forced to be transparent if they decide not to. They can build their houses out of tin if they don't want people to spy on them using thermal vision. You will be allowed to lie if you want. The only difference, is that people will remember that you lied, or didn't cooperate into sharing valuable facts, and that will hurt your reputation. In a future where your reputation is everything, you will have difficulty finding people that will trust you and accept to do business with you. Selfishness, while a totally legal choice, likely won't be rewarded.

Can you explain why asking you to be transparent about your personally identifiable information is laughable?

Also: privacy isn't about reward and personal power, it's about reducing risk - specifically, the risk that those with power over you are able to manipulate your future in ways you cannot defend against.

There is a distinct difference between the reward and the risk mitigation that privacy can bring, and I fear that's the aspect of the argument that you will never understand.

Why don't you post your private bitcoin keys for your wallets, if you have any. Just to put your money where your mouth is.

You do realize that private keys only make sense as a security mechanism when kept secret, right? This system was never meant to work in a transparent environment, and using that as an argument against that proposed environment is flawed.

Should we not colonize Mars because airplanes don't work there?

You may need to reread the comment

a) would be a terrific outcome for future historians.

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