Re:Data on 7% of Americans Were Just Hacked, Now What?
by miguelrochefort on Saturday July 11, 2015 @02:50AM
(#9868829)
I'm being extremist for the sake of argument and consistency. I don't recommend you go out and live a completely transparent life today when the rest of society is not ready. So many things in today's society rely on some expectation of privacy, which currently makes the transition impractical. An example of that is private key cryptography.
Although not very good at it, my purpose here is to bring awareness to the unsustainable nature of privacy, and demonstrate some benefits of transparency. I want people to adopt a long-term outlook and eventually reach these conclusions themselves. I've been thinking about that a lot, playing the devil's advocate for both sides, and I honestly can't see anything good coming from this reliance on privacy. I have some trouble understanding how that's not obvious to more people.
Many people on HN are looking for problems to solve, but have trouble finding them. I've often claimed that problems are some of the easiest things to find, and I'll show you an example here. Privacy is like a band-aid. It doesn't solve the underlying cause of problems. It just makes the problem go away, out of sight out of mind. It quickly became the go-to way to fix non-trivial problems, usually through some kind of law enforcement. Exactly like SOPA/PIPA, patents, copyrights, and censorship in general. I don't know why these things have different names, because they're all exactly the same things. And I mean exactly.
When privacy is hypothetically removed, people come up with a ton of potential problems. Private key encryption is one of them ("people will know your password"). The business opportunity here would be to to allow authentication, prevent fraud, and maybe secure systems without the use of password or secret keys. I said "maybe" because we probably should re-evaluate the concept of private property in the first place (which could reduce our reliance on security, for example).
I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If you understand privacy as being intrinsically valuable, then it might look like it. But my argument goes beyond that. My claim is that privacy has no intrinsic value, and is actually evil. I'm not giving up on privacy because it's too hard, I'm actively trying to get rid of it. Even if we had some magic that would lead to perfect security and privacy, I would advocate against it.
Let's make something else clear. I value freedom enormously, and I'm strictly opposed to coercion. Nobody will be forced to be transparent if they decide not to. They can build their houses out of tin if they don't want people to spy on them using thermal vision. You will be allowed to lie if you want. The only difference, is that people will remember that you lied, or didn't cooperate into sharing valuable facts, and that will hurt your reputation. In a future where your reputation is everything, you will have difficulty finding people that will trust you and accept to do business with you. Selfishness, while a totally legal choice, likely won't be rewarded.
Although not very good at it, my purpose here is to bring awareness to the unsustainable nature of privacy, and demonstrate some benefits of transparency. I want people to adopt a long-term outlook and eventually reach these conclusions themselves. I've been thinking about that a lot, playing the devil's advocate for both sides, and I honestly can't see anything good coming from this reliance on privacy. I have some trouble understanding how that's not obvious to more people.
Many people on HN are looking for problems to solve, but have trouble finding them. I've often claimed that problems are some of the easiest things to find, and I'll show you an example here. Privacy is like a band-aid. It doesn't solve the underlying cause of problems. It just makes the problem go away, out of sight out of mind. It quickly became the go-to way to fix non-trivial problems, usually through some kind of law enforcement. Exactly like SOPA/PIPA, patents, copyrights, and censorship in general. I don't know why these things have different names, because they're all exactly the same things. And I mean exactly.
When privacy is hypothetically removed, people come up with a ton of potential problems. Private key encryption is one of them ("people will know your password"). The business opportunity here would be to to allow authentication, prevent fraud, and maybe secure systems without the use of password or secret keys. I said "maybe" because we probably should re-evaluate the concept of private property in the first place (which could reduce our reliance on security, for example).
I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If you understand privacy as being intrinsically valuable, then it might look like it. But my argument goes beyond that. My claim is that privacy has no intrinsic value, and is actually evil. I'm not giving up on privacy because it's too hard, I'm actively trying to get rid of it. Even if we had some magic that would lead to perfect security and privacy, I would advocate against it.
Let's make something else clear. I value freedom enormously, and I'm strictly opposed to coercion. Nobody will be forced to be transparent if they decide not to. They can build their houses out of tin if they don't want people to spy on them using thermal vision. You will be allowed to lie if you want. The only difference, is that people will remember that you lied, or didn't cooperate into sharing valuable facts, and that will hurt your reputation. In a future where your reputation is everything, you will have difficulty finding people that will trust you and accept to do business with you. Selfishness, while a totally legal choice, likely won't be rewarded.