[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.