You say that you think this would lead to a better society. That aside, how would you personally feel if this vision was to become reality?

For me, I’m certain my mind being totally exposed like that would lead to debilitating mental illness and possibly even the loss of the will to live. I can’t imagine human beings, either as individuals or a collective, being fundamentally equipped to deal with such a thing.

If someone can slip cameras into what looks to me like gnats and film my bathing, well, my bathing isn't so exciting, but how can we prevent it? Some weird EM shielding arms race on nano-bots or something? And still all the sound I utter will be recorded. I wouldn't want to live on a planet with no insects. If I were 9 and I had a "build your own flying gnat" kit, pretty sure I might try to find out about what naked people look like. Now I grew up in a relatively repressed family and society, so maybe the cool Europeans have a different take on it. Maybe if there's 10M "watch people all the time" public channels with video feeds from all over the planet, peoples mental health would adjust somehow. I suspect we'll find out. Most people (that I talk to in real life) are stolidly uninterested in the "omg, do you know what the data people are gathering thru your phone" facts.

I for sure don't want to live in a society where the powerful have privacy and none of the regular people do.

I don't think that means we don't need privacy. It absolutely has value.

The problem is when privacy is only available to the rich and powerful, while the details about the rest of us are hoarded and used by the very same powerful people who pay such a premium for their privacy.

If we allow the collection of information, that information should absolutely be public, but that doesn't mean we should allow everything to be collected.

I never heard any convincing argument about why privacy has value.

>but that doesn't mean we should allow everything to be collected.

Why ?

You have either _never_ had to keep a secret (which I highly doubt, unless you happen to be a literal child) or you simply aren't arguing in good faith.

Assuming that you are arguing in good faith, let's consider a potential reason why someone might value their privacy:

Some people are born attracted to the same-sex (gay, lesbian, bi, pan, etc.).

There are some countries where being gay is a criminal offense; there are even some countries where you can face the death penalty for this. [1]

If a gay person lives in one of those countries, don't they have a right to keep this fact about themselves private simply in order to protect themselves? Or does their life have less value than the profit that can be generated by the "Data Economy"?

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

So that is the actual problem, not the privacy.

Without those gatherings, organizing against anti-gay propaganda (equating it to pedophilia, claiming it would be the downfall of civilization, etc.) would have been impossible and it's unlikely that the laws criminalizing homosexuality would have ever been changed.

If you kill privacy then you'll also kill the ability of marginalized groups to organize against any future oppression.

I doubt you actually believe that privacy doesn't matter however, because you're posting here under a pseudonym and haven't linked any social media accounts or anything which could reveal "private" details like your full legal name, place of residence/work, etc.

Impossible is a really strong word. I'm not saying that its going to be easy but I doubt that its impossible. That's my point lets spend the effort to figure out/solve this problem instead of trying to hide information.

>I doubt you actually believe that privacy doesn't matter however, because you're posting here under a pseudonym and haven't linked any social media accounts or anything which could reveal "private" details like your full legal name, place of residence/work, etc.

I would love to have everything for everyone to be public so that I don't have to worry about hiding those information. The problem is right now I can't. That's why I'm advocating we spent the effort on solving the problem that arise when the information is public rather than trying to hide information.

Likewise, if I'm gay I would much much prefer to have gay to be decriminalized rather than hiding my sexual orientation.

So you're willing to concede that people being unable to make the choice to keep something about themselves private will make it harder for them to promote their own rights? Can you understand how a lack of the ability to have private conversations, relationships, etc. could cause serious problems for some people?

Because earlier in the thread you said: "I never heard any convincing argument about why privacy has value." but now you are seem to be implying that privacy actually does have value to some people, correct?

> That's why I'm advocating we spent the effort on solving the problem that arise when the information is public rather than trying to hide information.

That would be a reasonable statement if you weren't also earlier criticizing the concept of privacy and stating that it had no value. You can choose to reject the idea that people should have individual privacy and try to push for a world where people didn't feel that they had to keep secrets, but you'd need to fix all the systemic issues before you could ethically promote the sort of radical transparency that you're talking about.

Trying to claim that privacy doesn't matter because it'd "be better if everything was public" without first addressing these other issues is terribly callous and could only seek to increase the amount of trauma in the world.

Yes it could cause serious problem but not the privacy itself that the problem, its other people using it to harm other people is the problem.

My conversation being public by itself is not a problem, the problem is when people use it to harm me.

>but now you are seem to be implying that privacy actually does have value to some people, correct?

In any case its not the privacy itself that has value.

So is it OK to advocate for the destruction of people's privacy in this situation or not?

If it is, then you're admitting that you just don't care about the harm that could occur (and trying to minimize the responsibility you'd have by hand-waving the issue as being "other people")

If it is not OK to destroy people's privacy in this situation, then your entire argument about how the coerced loss of privacy isn't a problem is contradictory.

No, to minimize harm is my eventual goal.

There are multiple way to achieve that.

You can try to by privacy or by fixing the actual issue.

I would much prefer the actual issue to be fixed.

When you fix the actual problem, the privacy become irrelevant.

>If it is not OK to destroy people's privacy in this situation, then your entire argument about how the coerced loss of privacy isn't a problem is contradictory

My argument is the loss of privacy by itself its not a problem.

Your response was that you would "much prefer the actual issue to be fixed" and that "When you fix the actual problem, the privacy become irrelevant".

Which (presumably intentionally) sidesteps the question of whether you think it is reasonable to advocate for the destruction of someone's privacy when it is likely to cause them harm.

In your advocacy for the destruction of privacy in this thread, you haven't proposed anything which could minimize harm for people who rely on privacy; in fact you have taken great steps to even acknowledge that there are people who could be harmed by the destruction of their privacy.

At the same time, you're willing to acknowledge that you don't want to post comments here using anything other than a pseudonym because "the problem is right now I can't". So you are admitting that you'd prefer to keep some privacy around your identity.

This could be a reasonable position if you were willing to acknowledge that people (other than you) could be harmed by the loss of their privacy. You have refused to acknowledge this and so that argument is untenable.

Finally, you stated that your argument was that "the loss of privacy by itself is not a problem". You haven't provided any evidence nor explanation of why you believe this to be the case and have refused to acknowledge the value of privacy, despite multiple examples and the obvious hypocrisy of not "practicing what you preach" (though I'd be willing to accept this if you didn't claim that privacy has no value whatsoever)

I did give an example of a situation where someone could be harmed and you didn't bother to address it.

I think you're just being disingenuous and I don't see the point in engaging any further in this discussion.

Privacy provides a fundemental protection from persecution by your government. This is precisely why the constitution includes specific privacy protections.

So while we should fight governments that persecute homosexuality, we also need to protect at least some aspects of privacy to keep protections for the next persecuted group.

Should we avoid preventing further damage that the domestic company is doing? Or should we limit ourselves to dealing with the issue diplomatically, and not do anything else for fear of "looking at the wrong problem"?

I don't understand why you'd seriously suggest that reducing the likelihood of known harm (by ensuring some level of privacy) is the wrong thing to think about when it doesn't prevent other actions from being taken too. It's possible for groups of people to do different things at the same time, after all.

Ultimately, your argument will never result in a situation where privacy is taken seriously because you could substitute in any issue and your conclusion could just as easily be that "better privacy is looking at the wrong problem."

I don’t know anyone that would want to spend money on a hotel if there was a security camera in the room. I would get the more expensive room without the camera, probably go to a different hotel.

Doctor and patient confidentiality is implicitly understood. Do you think doctors should be able to tell advertisers what their patients are going through.

Maybe your own individual privacy doesn’t have value to you, and that’s okay, but other people value their privacy, and these corps profiting off data definitely find value in lack of privacy.

It’s been more than a decade, but I was impressed by this research from Allessandro Acquisti that suggested people valued their data only in the pennies.

When 25 Cents is too much: An Experiment on Willingness-To-Sell and Willingness-To-Protect Personal Information, Jens Grossklags, Alessandro Acquisti, Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS), 2007

why do you think is that ?

>Do you think doctors should be able to tell advertisers what their patients are going through

Why do you think they shouldn't ?

>these corps profiting off data definitely find value in lack of privacy.

Yes of course there is value in lack of privacy, but what is value in privacy ?

You should set the example. Go ahead and post your e-mail address and password for us.

Anyone who thinks such transparency is a good idea should read Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's Light of Other Days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days

The problem that need to be solves is not how to hide information but how to fix the issue that arise when the information are public.

Lets talk about one example :

Right now it is a problem if my credit card number become public because it can be used for unauthorized purchase.

Simply having my credit card number become public is not an issue perse but for it to be used for unauthorized purchase is the problem.

But what if I can have my credit card number public while nobody can use it for unauthorized purchase ? then I won't have issue for it being public.

What other way of preventing that do you propose? Fingerprint? I will will send the data of fingerprint. Facial recognition? I will just grab your profile picture. What kind of method do you envise that could prove you are you and not somebody malicious?

Here is another example: some people argue for privacy because the information can be used to criminalized gay people.

Well then fix the criminalization of gay people instead of trying to hide the fact that they are gay.

>Facial Recognition?

That could be one way

> I will just grab your profile picture.

Then maybe fix it to detect whether its a real person or just a picture.

Or maybe there are better way, I don't know.

Like I said, I'm not the expert, I wouldn't know every solution to every problem.

My point is we should spent the effort on figuring out that problem instead of trying to keep thing hiding.

You say "just fix it to detect whether it's legit data" - how? Deep fakes are getting better by the day, we already have problems with recognizing them ourselves.

Again, I'm not the expert, every situation will may require its unique solution.

>You say "just fix it to detect whether it's legit data" - how

Yes this my attempt to at least give a hint with my far from expert knowledge.

My point is we should spend our effort to solve this instead of trying to make information private.

No, this isn't a hint, because I already stated why it wouldn't work: thief will just use publicly available data and create deep fake to mimic the owner of the bank account.

If we had technology which could magically determine whether received data is genuine, the only safety check would be "Are you an owner? [y/n]"

> My point is we should spend our effort to solve this instead of trying to make information private.

Again, nobody sane ever have spend any effort on something without even a hint for it being possible. I am asking: what's your argument to even think it's possible?

It'd be fascinating to watch someone to try and recreate concepts from cryptography without the crypto though!

Care to specify which list entries you have trouble believing?