Re:Nash’s “Ideal Money and Asymptotically Ideal Money” Annot...
by TeMPOraL on Tuesday October 06, 2015 @08:42PM
(#10343455)
> 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?
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?