[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.

[mindslight]

Completely agree with everything but the last sentence...

Defecting (reading things one "shouldn't") is economically profitable, just like walking into others' homes and making their stuff into your stuff. Furthermore, it's politically profitable to catch the "bad guys". So the best one could hope for is a social convention to not snoop, prohibition on private surveillance / data mining (what could that even look like?), and the government still snooping everything to ferret out undesirables.

[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.

[mindslight]

> I believe that no one really wants privacy, they really want the freedom to act transparently without punishment

In that framework, punishment includes things like "being shunned by a friend due to exposing your personal beliefs". Yet that friend should have the right to freely associate with whom they please. Please resolve this conflict without requiring people conform to your specifications.

> the original problem is about the person and their world according to their morals

You said: "how do we create a world that places everyone in their own private moral world".

I'm asking how you create this private moral world for someone who's moral desire is to force their will on other people.

Schelling points also apply to abstract concepts, like the idea of property itself. Private property is an abstraction we could take or leave, so why do we find it so useful?

A property line, with a fence or without, very clearly delineates who has authority over which square inch. If your neighbor decides to store stuff on your side of the line, they are clearly in the "wrong". They can easily foresee this, so the situation likely does not even come up.