[nunyabuizness]

I wish I could upvote this more. One reply mentions how easy anti-sodomy laws would be to enforce if we had no privacy. Considering how much faith people put in democracy and the democratic process, you'd think that people would concede that it's the law and our influence over it that's the problem, not privacy.

One question I like to propose to those who disagree with this sentiment is as follows:

Imagine you live in a hypothetical world where all things you consider moral, just and socially acceptable were legal and societally acceptable and where everything else was illegal and societally reprehensible. What role would privacy play in such a society? What benefits would it provide?

I have yet to get a good answer to that question; if peeing in public was ok with me, everyone else and perfectly legal, what reason would I have not to do it? (You can mention shaming and whatnot, but I posit that in this hypothetical world based on my morality, if I didn't shame people, no one else would either).

tl;dr: the problem isn't privacy, the problem is law and our inability to influence it, for which our best tool for the problems that arise from our lack of influence is privacy.

[jib]

Privacy is a protection and insurance for the future.

Things, like say, recording the religion of someone in an open, embracing and understanding society that has full religious freedom, so you understand what your population identifies seems harmless, right?

It certainly seemed like it to the Jews in the Netherlands in the 1930s.

[TeMPOraL]

Jews in the Netherlands is a perfect example because I can't see how can one reasonably claim that it proves we shouldn't be doing censuses.

If an evil dictator wants to get you, he will get you, with or without a census available. There are countless other ways for him to explore. Shutting down every possible avenue of global optimization because it relies on knowing stuff about people is not a way to run a civilization.

[nunyabuizness]

Would privacy protect a black in 1930's Poland? Would it matter to them if they did or did not register their identity or religion with their government of full religious freedom? Where's their right to privacy (of their ethnicity)?

The only insurance against unrestrained power for anyone's future is restraining the power, not privacy. Privacy is what you resort to when all else fails, which even then is clearly not enough for everyone.

[jib]

It is well established that the extended civil records of the Netherlands in the 30s contributed to the high rates of mass murder in the Netherlands compared to other countries with less developed systems. This is a real life example of where a lack of privacy thinking, even though not done with bad intent, led to significant loss of life.

Protection of personal rights is not about a single solution, it is about multiple systems in a Swiss cheese model where privacy is one of those layers. Other layers are a judicial system, democratic elections etc. Stating that there are situations where one of the layers fail isn't proving anything, it is obvious that they fail some of the time. The question is if a layer adds something significant some of the time. Privacy does.

[miguelrochefort]

Even if privacy successfully protected those people, I would argue that this would make things even worse. Why? Because privacy protecting the majority of people minimizes the apparent danger of the underlying problem (killing Jews), which cause people to ignore the problem as if it doesn't exists, during which the problem grows until privacy proves to not be enough.

Privacy is a painkiller. It gives us the impression that the problem isn't there, but in reality it keeps getting worse until death hits.

[nunyabuizness]

You didn't answer anything I proposed - if I'm being oppressed based on something that can't be made private, what difference does privacy make?

> it is about multiple systems in a Swiss cheese model where privacy is one of those layers.

True, but acting like it is the cardinal solution for which ultimate personal freedom will emerge is a farce and is ignoring the real reasons we want privacy in the first place - we don't have the freedom of transparency b/c of legal actors over which we have little to no control.

> Stating that there are situations where one of the layers fail isn't proving anything, it is obvious that they fail some of the time

The point of pointing out the flaw is not to prove that privacy isn't important, but that it's not nearly as important as the underlying issues for which privacy still won't fix.

> The question is if a layer adds something significant some of the time. Privacy does.

Until the unchecked power discriminates based on things that can't be made private. Watch the watchman and privacy becomes a nice bonus rather than a critical component of a half-solution.

[miguelrochefort]

Hitler's a good guy. Jews should have been more discrete. Too bad they didn't have encryption back then. /s

[nmjohn]

> Imagine you live in a hypothetical world where all things you consider moral, just and socially acceptable were legal and societally acceptable and where everything else was illegal and societally reprehensible. What role would privacy play in such a society? What benefits would it provide?

Sure, that hypothetical would be great for _you_ (you being the decider of morality) - but what about everyone else living in the world? It is fundamentally impossible for a world to exist where your hypothetical can be true for everyone.

Consider this - the hypothetical you describe is currently true for some set of people. And yet it ruins lives and causes misery for millions of others.

[nunyabuizness]

Precisely! So the issue to solve is how do we create a world that places everyone in their own private moral world, a result of which is a significantly lower dependence on the losing battle of privacy!

There are a couple ways to give us that world: free markets for law, voluntarism, or to a significantly less extreme, smaller federal governments and more influential, perhaps larger local governments, for which you have a significantly greater say in making law. Other patches to the problem of shitty law include greater accountability of elected (politicians) and appointed officials (i.e. police, bureaucrats). These are only the proposals off the top of my head, but already, in the process of tackling this problem, many other problems dissipate for free.

[mindslight]

Your proposals aren't really solutions, but ways of kicking the can down the road. The disagreement still exists, it's just hidden in the remainder. They can serve to minimize that disagreement, but it can never be eliminated.

The simplest counter-sentence to how you've stated the problem: let's say someone thinks it is moral to impose their will on to others - how do you give them this world? The only way to actually achieve your utopia is VR.

Good fences make good neighbors - privacy is a fence.

[nunyabuizness]

Championing privacy over fixing the reasons we need privacy is the ultimate kicking of the can down the road - encryption won't prevent the government from harassing me based on my skin color or my choice of employment, or anything else I do or am that can't be encrypted.

> let's say someone thinks it is moral to impose their will on to others

I don't know how to respond to that as any rights and morals you could legitimately give yourself or obey by definition can not depend on other people's compliance.

> Good fences make good neighbors - privacy is a fence.

Really? Do you even know your neighbors? Would you really argue that you'd know them less or that they or you'd be "worse" if you didn't have fences?

[mindslight]

> encryption won't prevent the government from harassing me based on my skin color or my choice of employment, or anything else I do or am that can't be encrypted.

Agreed. But if these are your overriding concerns, then go campaign for them. Don't campaign against privacy in hope of indirectly fixing your actual concerns. Surely you'd agree a world without privacy but still with governmental discrimination is the worst outcome, and by inverting and campaigning against autonomy you'll find it quite easy to get to.

> I don't know how to respond to that as any rights and morals you could legitimately give yourself or obey by definition can not depend on other people's compliance.

Well it's pretty simple for them to get their subject to comply, by applying pain.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but you'd reply that they are acting immorally. But that is not how you originally defined the problem.

So we change the definition to require non-aggression, there is no one left to enforce transgressions.

So we change the definition to allow aggression only to enforce non-aggression - then we have to pull in a concept of what's-worse to avoid escalation. And this framework must still be agreed upon by everybody!

This is not arbitrary bickering or simply not defining things smart enough. This is the inherent generation of complexity by following implications.

> Really? Do you even know your neighbors?

Now, not so much. In the past, sure. It's a general saying, and it's a general saying for a reason. The idea is to not have to negotiate socially with them. Please read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory), it fits right in with the other concepts you are referencing.

[TeMPOraL]

Fences in the past were mostly symbolic. If your neighbor wanted to get past it, he could usually just walk over it. Enforcing privacy is an equivalent of contemporary closed-off neighborhoods, with cameras and guards always on post.

The benefit you gain from making a Schelling point is a social kind of thing. It works because people agree it works. Just like all other customs. People bring up privacy of correspondence as an example of ages-old privacy right, but it works only because everyone agrees that reading others' correspondence is a dick thing. If we can relearn to rely more on such things than on direct enforcement, maybe an open world would be better for everyone than private, locked down one.

[nunyabuizness]

> Don't campaign against privacy in hope of indirectly fixing your actual concerns

So that's my fault for conflating two things without making it explicit - 1) privacy is a non-issue b/c of my aforementioned reasons and 2) I believe that no one really wants privacy, they really want the freedom to act transparently without punishment (since we can't have that, we ask for privacy instead).

> But that is not how you originally defined the problem.

B/c the original problem is about the person and their world according to their morals: if I used pain to get my way and it was legal, what need would I have for privacy?

> The idea is to not have to negotiate socially with them.

The article you provided only declares that there are points that exist that people will converge to when coordinating when communication can't be trusted or is non-existant, and I fail to see the relevance of it to this discussion.

[teddyh]

If we assume that laws can never be perfect, it is obvious why perfect enforcement of laws can never be a completely good thing. Not to mention corrupt officials, selective enforcement, etc.

[nunyabuizness]

Again, corrupt officials, selective enforcement, etc are the problems, not lack privacy. There are a number of ways to make the nature of law better (free markets for law, direct democracy, actual representative democracy, etc), which would all render the need for as much privacy as people are advocating moot.

The minute you declare privacy enforcement a greater problem than fair law-making and fair law enforcement, you've started a losing game for which the oppressors (the ones you're using privacy as a defense against) have already won.