Privacy and freedom are different concepts, though. A world in which the government can monitor all of your phone calls, but it not allowed by law to stop them or prosecute you over their contents still preserves freedom very strongly, without any privacy (assuming the law constraining the government is enforceable, and extra judicial or spurious prosecutions are not a tool commonly available to the state). A world in which technology (or lack thereof) makes wiretapping impossible, gives a lot of privacy to people, but if you can still be arrested because of distributing a leaflet, it provides little freedom.

Thing is, even in a world where freedom of expression were inviolable (and it isn't quite this world, so in reality, privacy helps support freedom of expression), we'd still want privacy to be a human right. Animals don't behave the same when they know they are always being watched. Pervasive surveillance inhibits thought, breeds abuse and unnecessarily limits human behavior.

Also, in the end, we have the right to have things to hide. We have the right to say and do things we are ashamed of, or aren't sure are right, or we are not ready to defend under scrutiny of society at large. We have the right to share thoughts with others that we are not ready to defend from strangers, even if the law prevents such strangers from hurting us because our thoughts. Society needs to be able to discuss heresy, and revolution, and treason, because what for one generation is treason and heresy, for the next might be justice and freedom. But it also needs to be able to have some of those discussions in dark, private places, because a lot of great thoughts will only ever bloom in the dark. Even if mass surveillance worked (it doesn't), even if abuse could be curtailed (it can't), even if it gave us a world without crime (it won't), the price to pay would be a world where our thoughts are constrained by the fear of other's seeing them in their underdeveloped raw form.

http://kazerad.tumblr.com/post/99022123468/shepherd-of-the-m... This post goes further into the shame idea and explores how communities use shame to self-censor and censor others from doing any supposedly-shameful activities, and on top of that explains some of the importances of anonymity in a way that I think most people on HN haven't considered before.