However, when you engage with another party and make promises, and then break them, the other party should have a way to prove what you said in a dispute. I think the default mode should not be “off the record”. Because most parties aren’t savvy enough to demand that you go “on the record” right before you talk. Instead, you can ask to go “off the record” so that will be the alert that none of your promises will matter during that period.
If being “on the record” is the default for all conversations, that’s what I’m talking about. The concept of “privacy” still applies to non-participants in the interaction.
The main question is, can we extend this expectation to other interactions not just conversations online? What if one of the participants had been carrying tiny body cameras and microphones, which has become more and more feasible to do?
You know how many rape crimes could be solved? Or police altercations? Imagine if everyone KNEW they were being recorded.
What if the cameras were not on the person’s body, but in the room? Surely we wouldn’t know, so the laws have to allow for it. But suppose we COULD legislate what these cameras did. One is to outlaw all cameras. The other is what if the video footage was always encrypted and it would require two keys:
1) M of N of the participants
2) a judge saying this is an active dispute / trial
It is in the interest of both parties to unlock the video once there is a court case, to help resolve what happened. Refusing to do so may be seen as an admission of guilt. The main reason for 1) is to allow people the option to be presumed guilty / held in contempt of court but not reveal the evidence against them. The problem is that they may be protecting some mob boss etc. so we may have to relax the condition 1) to just one of the parties. But recording entrapment still won’t be legal in two-party states.
I think most of us would still use it. To record our lives so you can review or share the good parts or prove something you said, heard or seen. It's already happening with phones (they just don't record all the time but that's mostly to technical limitations) and I think people today would love to be able to get easy, legal access to footage containing them from other sources.
I'd love to have that capability. What matters is who controls it. If everything about me was constantly recorded but I was the person that decides if and when make some of this information available to other people (and initally to whom) then it would be great and I think that's our future that marries our progressing tech with our freedoms.
If I can be coerced to reveal information about myself or it can be revealed at the whim of government, judge or a corporation, then it's a dystopian nightmare which we see some people are trying to create for example by coercing people to reveal their passwords or unlock their devices.
There's of course some grey area like public places where privacy does not apply. Your thoughts there are private but the rest is not yours. We have pretty much worked out what's private and what's public in physical space. As for digital space I think things I do on my local machine or on another machine that I control then it's private. Once I do something on someone elses machine it stops being private.