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by krapp 3949 days ago
You're basically making the case that, if you have nothing to fear, you should have nothing to hide. But, replacing "fraudsters" with "terrorists" or "online weed dealers" in your comment states the law enforcement and intelligence community case against personal privacy pretty clearly.

I think that, in practice, it's about whether or not social media sites and search engines should be forced to maintain a market on personal data to serve as a crowdsourced proxy for state-sponsored surveillance.
1 comments
TeMPOraL 3949 days ago
I see a difference between privacy (preventing information about you from getting out) and rewriting history after the fact. Historical data is a public good, it's much bigger than an individual and his affairs, whether legit or not.
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krapp 3949 days ago
>I see a difference between privacy (preventing information about you from getting out) and rewriting history after the fact.

I don't, in this case. Search engines and social media sites were never intended to serve as arbiters of historical truth. Is it really a good idea to suddenly pretend they are, and insist they act like it?

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TeMPOraL 3949 days ago
Search engines weren't intended to be anything, they weren't designed up front by committee. They just ended up what they are. Twitter also wasn't intended to be the channel for officials to communicate with the public, nor Facebook the ultimate Yellow Pages, nor was Google Maps commissioned to become the world's most popular GIS.

You could argue that preserving public goods is the task for the government and yes, we shouldn't insist that private companies do their job for them. But here, we have a company that wants to do that job out of its own will, and the governments insist they stop.

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