[miguelrochefort]

I was trying to convey my intuition in terms OP could relate to. I obviously didn't do a very good job.

I don't care about equality of outcome. Heck, I'm not even sure I care about equality of opportunity. All I care about is efficiency, and privacy is inefficient. This is the main reason I despise it.

It also seems obvious that privacy is unsustainable and likely to disappear in the future. Knowing this, we should prepare for it. I don't see many people talking about this.

[murftown]

> privacy is inefficient. This is the main reason I despise it.

Certainly not in all cases, maybe not even most? For example, it's efficient to have a private key to log in to your server rather than just leaving it open to get hacked. It's efficient to have a private email inbox so your bank login doesn't get stolen. It's efficient to have a computer you can audit and control the software running on, so that your computer and data don't get compromised. Etc.

Everyone would be screwed without privacy. Being screwed is inefficient. This is the main reason I despise it. For people to move from more secure to less secure systems and paradigms in the name of "total transparency", they would need some assurance that they wouldn't be screwed. And I don't know if making an assurance like that is mathematically possible.

> It also seems obvious that privacy is unsustainable and likely to disappear in the future. Knowing this, we should prepare for it. I don't see many people talking about this.

This may seem obvious to you but I don't see any evidence for it. For one thing, how can you (even approximately) "measure" how much privacy there is? Privacy is by definition what you AREN'T able to see or account for in your ("total transparency") system. So if for example SMSs, IMs, emails and phone calls all become "totally transparent" (i.e. not secure), then we still have no evidence that privacy is "likely to disappear", because, for example, anyone can still just write their ideas in a physical notebook, and we have no idea how much this happens.

[miguelrochefort]

There's nothing efficient about keeping secrets and encrypting stuff. Our reliance on private key cryptography is horrifying. Keeping secrets is unsustainable, and making one mistake can break the whole system. This is far too fragile, and guaranteed to be universally broken in the near future.

The problems you described are authentication problems. It seems obvious that total transparency is the best (and only?) solution to those problems.

There will always be things we don't know. I don't think we'll ever become omniscient. That's fine. What I want is for people to understand how important it is to share and seek knowledge and resources. Tell people how you feel, share your medical records, open source your code, let people use your car. We can't work together if we don't share.