[karmacondon]

The underlying assumption to your hypothetical is that thought crimes exist. I would say that someone in that situation doesn't have a privacy problem, they have a governance problem. Either a dictator has seized power or their fellow citizens have voted to make it illegal to express certain ideas. And in either case, encryption isn't going to be much of a solution. It'll only delay the inevitable. Someone who talks about illegal ideas is taking a big risk anyway.

It seems common that the arguments for privacy trumping other values depend on bad behavior by state actors. In which case, reforming the state by whatever means necessary would probably do more good than advocating for philosophical concepts.

[mutatismutandis]

Fair. I was just trying to take the problem to the hypothetical edge of having no privacy at all; to a case where you do not even enough privacy to share a thought without fear of retribution. I was also trying to align the idea with their understanding of freedom of speech, they do agree freedom of speech is ok, so if you can tie speech into thought and then also into privacy, maybe there would be a logical connection that allows them to understand the need for privacy as a type of freedom.

The situation is very complex because privacy has been implicit in our daily lives for so long, it's really difficult to map out the ways it would reduce our personal freedom. If we want to remove privacy, then we need to make it impossible for anyone to keep anything private from anyone else.

If privacy isn't important; then we should all live in proverbial glass houses where everyone can see everyone else's lives. Why should we trust the government with that power, why not everyone?