[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.

[TeMPOraL]

We could probably limit reasons for defecting by living a less competitive lives, but that's dreams of a better-than-Star-Trek-level utopia. Incentives are hard.

As for the government - a world where only the government gets to have privacy is a scary nightmare. A world with a government as transparent as possible, maybe it's workable. Honestly, I don't know. I need to study this more. I just don't like the costs that come with seriously increasing the amount of individual privacy. And/or I have too much faith in the good side of our nature.

[mindslight]

Even Star Trek has ranks, and I wouldn't want to be a red shirt.

I don't have much faith in the bad side of our nature not showing. Groupthink is a hell of a drug.

As far as costs, there's a continuum and it certainly has a lot of low hanging fruit. Some of the most glaring privacy problems could be easily fixed by people simply exerting a modicum of self-actualization when choosing software.