> At some point you simply come to a conflict in fundamental values and principles... a situation for which there is no real resolution.

I disagree - unless you actually treat privacy as irreducible, God-given value that needs to be protected; at that point there is no help. But I suspect you have practical reasons for your views, and those we can reduce and discuss based on facts and rational thinking until we figure out a common view.

Personally, I am not holding a political opinion on this topic, but a practical one. Dynamic, real-time optimization on the level of society, a city or a country requires the data privacy advocates fight to hide. To optimize traffic flow we need to track how and where everyone is driving. To optimize power distribution we need to know how much and when a person uses electricity. To simulate disease spread effectively we could use real-life movement patterns. Etc. Yes, you can do a lot of this using aggregate, anonymized datasets, but real-time non-anonymized stream would certainly be qualitatively better.

There are lots of things we should do to move forward as a society that go directly against privacy of individuals. Those things are not even discussed! Everyone is focusing on possibility of government abuse and the potential benefits offsetting those costs aren't usually mentioned.

And that's all still high-level problems. There's another, more low-level issue. New technology keeps reducing the amount of privacy available. 30 years ago it was very hard to keep someone under constant surveillance. Today, with technology in everyone's smartphone, it's trivial. So what are we supposed to do to protect our privacy? Halt all new technology development? Roll back the industrial evolution? Progress of technology is empowering individuals, that's the whole point - but it also means those individuals will be gaining abilities to reduce the privacy of otheres. Are we really willing to halt progress in order to accommodate privacy needs?

There are many solutions - to the problem, not to getting folks to agree. That's probably impossible, I agree.

We have little privacy, and have had less every generation. Its a matter of social mores, at least for public/social interaction. Say I can find out who you're staying with at the no-tell motel every Thursday. If its taboo to mention it, then you still have 'privacy'. Its the same as, no polite person mentions the sounds coming through the bathroom door - folks all know, but pretend they don't. Lots of things work this way, already.

I know, the govt knowing is different - that info will be used as leverage, every time, without mercy. Because the govt is an institution, and institutions have no morals.

I agree with your observation that a lot of privacy depends simply on social customs, and I think that in an advanced society this will always be primary way of keeping it.

I disagree with "and have had less [privacy] every generation". I think for the last hundred or so years we've been having unprecedented amounts of privacy thanks to urbanization and the anonymity that stems from it. In villages, where most people lived throughout history, there is no such thing as privacy.

In a way that makes sense - per-capita. But since villages were so tiny, the total number of people who knew your secrets was very small. Today, it numbers in the thousands/millions.

In this way we are sort of like a global village - gossip about you can and sometimes does travel around the entire globe. On the other hand, all those people "knowing" is almost as if they didn't knew anything at all - every one of those thousands/millions people have secrets of another thousands/millions to pick from.

I guess the primary place where our times are different is when it's you vs. a faceless Organization - a company or a government, where they can use your data against you while you have no target to retaliate against. In this way you may also say that we have less of that privacy with each generation, but that's because Organizations are quite recent things - your average villager of the past had neither need nor way to interact with their government the way we do today, and companies like we have now didn't even exist.

That last paragraph is probably the first time I thought that particular thought explicitly. At this point I'm not sure whether it's me conceding the point of continued loss of privacy in meaningful areas of life, or observing a strong correlation between diminishing privacy and progress of society, that may or may not turn out to be a causation of the "privacy vs. progress of mankind - pick one" form.

I'm going to book-mark your observation. Its concise and I think it will be reusable in many contexts!