[Santosh83]

Because the 'time and effort required to maintain my privacy' part requires immediate and sustained and rigorous action and sacrifice of various comforts, all for a nebulously perceived, personally theoretical risk.

The ultimate trajectory of liberal democracy is towards anarchism. But humans are anything but evolutionarily suited for that. We are biologically built to function in a hierarchy, even if the top of that hierarchy is tyrannical. This will take a long while to change. And enough efforts to educate are not being made. Not even close.

PS. Also wanted to add that the "maintain my privacy" part is still far too technical for anyone except diehard nerds, and even they confess it takes great effort and thought. The entire system has been taken over at all levels of the stack by commercial and political powers. The average Joe doesn't stand a chance unless he wants to go entirely off-grid.

[jnsie]

^ This

I am going to make a weird, but IMHO apt, comparison to Type 1 Diabetes. T1D is an attritional disease caused by the pancreas's inability to produce enough/any insulin and the list of complications is long and deadly. As someone who has lived with the disease for decades what makes the disease particularly insidious is immediate effort versus delayed impact. The disease affects everything...every single part of every single day. Eating, sleeping, exercising, traveling, finances...everything. And to be on top of everything is extremely effortful. However the impact of not taking enough insulin, of not checking blood sugars frequently enough, or living with high blood sugars, is delayed. Today's transgressions may not be punished for decades. It is no shock to read about poor therapy adherence when the effort is immediate (and constant) and the effect is delayed (and therefore hypothetical). I see the same issue - immediate and constant effort coupled with long term hypothetical effect - with protecting one's privacy. Obviously one should do the right thing. But many won't.

[radarsat1]

This is an incredibly insightful point of view for understanding people around me on this topic. And maybe a useful analogy for talking about it. Thank you.

[lisper]

Climate change is another area where this analogy is apt.

[scottLobster]

The key issue in your analogy being that we know T1D will actually have long-term consequences if left untreated. We don't yet know the cost of "lack of privacy". Part of me wonders if privacy advocates will be on the same level as doomsday preppers in a few decades, at least in the Democratic world. It's not that they were wrong to prepare for nuclear war given the information available during the Cold War, it's just that it never happened so their efforts were largely wasted.

To use myself as an example: I've had a gmail account since it was invite-only. Was on facebook as soon as it was available to high schoolers. So over 15 years now for both (although I'm basically off facebook at this point because it sucks now, I maintain a skeleton account to use the Marketplace). I've had an android phone for 6 years, used a "free" discount brokerage for years, etc, file my taxes with Turbotax, and use any number of services (including credit cards themselves) that likely sell my data in some form.

Any hard privacy-based damages have yet to materialize beyond a couple of stolen credit card numbers that were easily dealt with.

Now what's the "therapy" for all this?

1. Thoroughly examine the terms and conditions of any service/software I sign up for and actively avoid those who state they'll sell my data, and re-review said terms and conditions every time they're updated, canceling services when/if the terms turn malicious.

That point alone could be a career unto itself.

2. Run an adblocker which will inevitably break some sites and have to be periodically turned off

3. Run a Pi-Hole on a local router

4. Run anti-browser-fingerprinting extensions

5. Use a VPN to obfuscate location data

6. Switch from Android to Apple (and even Apple isn't perfect)

7. Avoid all social media

8. ...

There's an endless list of technical partial solutions that may or may not add up to any real difference, but will definitely consume hundreds or thousands of hours of time in set-up and maintenance and reserach, thousands of dollars in fees over the long haul if using paid services. Plus the daily grind of dealing with non-homogeneous and often 2nd-rate alternative tools because there isn't much money in privacy. All to prepare for a threat that may never materialize and hasn't materialized at all in the over 15 years people have been warning me about the issue.

I drink beer, wine and cider on the weekends. Yes I'm well aware that marginally increases my odds of getting cancer/other nastiness over decades. I don't care, I judge the increased risk negligible compared to the worth of enjoyment/socializing. Privacy falls into that same category for now. I tried using GnuCash to track my finances over privacy concerns. It won't connect to my bank for some reason, spent hours troubleshooting the issue, researching obscure bank communication protocols to no end. Maybe I could have figured it out, but Mint.com works with everything down to my power and gas utilities, was completely set up in less than 30 minutes.

I'd like Privacy, but I think people sneer at the word "convenience" more than they should. Convenience means I get time back, the one resource we all definitely have a finite amount of. And maybe there will be some great privacy crisis some day, in the same sense that there may be nuclear war. I'm not building a fallout shelter any time soon, I've got better things to do.

[bentcorner]

> Part of me wonders if privacy advocates will be on the same level as doomsday preppers in a few decades, at least in the Democratic world

Related is the fact that people making waves about privacy now have actually made a difference, and even if we're not in a "100% privacy" world, maybe it's good enough.

Reminds me of Y2K. Consumers at the time heard it was a big deal, and then nothing happened. But industry fixed a ton of things that were broken before Y2K so that nothing major did happen.

[jnsie]

I agree with your points and think "convenience" is an oft misused term in this context. It is "inconvenient" for me to go downstairs to pick up my Uber Eats delivery. It is nothing short of toil to do the multitude of things required to guard privacy/kidneys.

I'll add, with regard to T1D, that I am fortunate enough to have an endocrinologist who is effectively an expert tasked with staying up to date with the science and facilitating the best outcomes for me, the patient. I am not sure if there is a parallel when it comes to privacy. Sure, there are orgs out there that will take your money and provide you with solutions that claim to guard privacy but it's difficult to confirm their intent and capability. My endo works in a regulated environment with statutes to guard against kickbacks and other bad behavior and has little incentive for malevolence.

[FalconSensei]

Also, with T1D we have ways to actually knowing your 'score'. A1C and time in range are good? Urine tests are good? Nice.

With privacy, how do I know my 'privacy score'? It's way more difficulty to do any 'health checkup', compare to how you were 6 months before and plan around known risks for the future

[jnsie]

Excellent point!

[fsflover]

Electronic Frontier Foundation is one such privacy-helping nonprofit one can trust.

[THATthereguy]

Wow, this is a really good analogy. Sad, but true.

[throwaway81523]

> The ultimate trajectory of liberal democracy is towards anarchism.

It's more like towards feudalism, and that's what the surveillance helps achieve. That's why surveillance is dangerous.

[deregulateMed]

>towards anarchy

Yet every democracy seems to tend toward dictatorships according to history.

But I agree the idea behind liberalism is individuals, which anarchy makes sense.

Given I have 3 to 5 government layers, Federal, State, city, HOA, and international law, I'd certainly prefer to get rid of a few of these layers due to corruption.

[roenxi]

> Yet every democracy seems to tend toward dictatorships according to history.

How could a democracy end if not dictatorship? I suppose sinking beneath the waves is an alternative, but that is pretty rare.

If you want to have some fun reading up on Wikipedia's list of Empires [0], take some time to appreciate that the Republic of Venice being the longest-lived Western European empire. And I'm no expert in Venetian history (especially being as they have so much of it), but it seems to have had some solid democratic elements for around 700 years.

Democracies have a messy, difficult to categorise staying power. I hear stories about Kings and Emperors, but nobody talks about the enduring-like-weeds powers that don't have neatly defined figureheads but are hotbeds of prosperity. Look at Switzerland working through the World Wars for example. Really a minor miracle at that time in that place.

And world's largest empire (the British) spawned numerous highly successful democracies.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_empires

[andrepd]

Venice wasn't a democracy in any meaningful way, either in the style of Greek democracy that preceded it or western liberal democracies that succeeded them. It was an oligarchy with limited democratic elements.

[roenxi]

Well, sure. But the Athenian-style Greek democracies were such an outrageous success that they're still a part of the common political discourse after 2,500 years and we still have things to learn from the stories they left us. I mean, not every democracy is going to achieve that level of success or quite that place in the public imagination.

What Venice had was pretty good compared to dictatorship.

[oscardssmith]

It's worth noting that the popular conception of "Greek democracy" tends to ignore the massive caste of slaves that Greek city states had.

[Zachsa999]

Tell me again how this applies to user privacy concerns?

[baybal2]

> Democracies have a messy, difficult to categorise staying power. I hear stories about Kings and Emperors, but nobody talks about the enduring-like-weeds powers that don't have neatly defined figureheads but are hotbeds of prosperity.

Don't look around for long.

United States of America — a truly improbable, impossible country. With so much of s**t going on through its history, any other normal country would've crashed, and burned 20 times over.

[labster]

Nah, we are biologically built to function in bands of no more than 300 people. Hierarchies are just the basic level of abstraction allowing bands to collectively form tribes, nations, and empires.

[Jorengarenar]

You are saying it as if "in bands of no more than 300 people" there was no hierarchy. It starts appearing at few dozens, let alone few hundreds.

Proof of it being biological? Look at other primates. They form groups of way less than few hundreds and still maintain (strict) hierarchy.

[js8]

It's nowhere as clear-cut as you try to portray it. First of all, there are differences among primates, how are these hierarchies structured and some of it is also, surprisingly, cultural. (Look for example at work of Robert Sapolsky.)

I for example believe that hierarchies are a cultural artifact of civilization, not a biologically inherent human value. The inherent human value is deference to authority, which is useful to maintain existing order and generational memory (and is the basis for what we typically call "conservative"). In tribes of 300 people or so, the hierarchies are easily challenged. In a civilization of 1000s of people, with incomplete information, this is much more difficult.

(That being said, I think there are individuals who do not share typical human values, and try to subvert those for their personal benefit. So these individuals might subvert the value of deference to authority to create a hierarchy from which then they personally benefit. Just like existence of somebody, who might always take and never give back, doesn't invalidate reciprocity as a typical human value.)

And in fact we increasingly live in a world where everybody is a member of multiple independent social hierarchies, and these apply situationally (and it's not even clear they are always needed). This really strains the claim that humans inherently favor hierarchies (which there should be only one), rather than just simply defer to authorities (which might be multiple or even chosen by each individual independently).

[dnautics]

I don't think deference to authority is inherently human, there are plenty of humans who resist authority to various degrees independent of socialization. It might be a "median" human quality though

[js8]

There is a difference in belief that the authority is good in general and accepting the existing authority; when I talk about deference to authority, I mean the former, but it doesn't always translate to or imply the latter.

I think it is a useful value (and so it evolved in humans), because it forms the basis of parent-child relationship and the transfer of culture. So as young, we reluctantly defer to authority of our parents and other elders, and as we grow older, we begin to believe in the existence of authority as necessary to prevent the cultural collapses due to social experimentation gone wrong (which might result as pursuit of other human values). The fear of such cultural collapse (and the need to prevent them, through authority) is the focal point of conservative values.

Of course, in modern society, this gets pretty muddled, because the rate of change in societies has accelerated and actual authorities (in power) are often younger and change too quickly to really facilitate the transfer of life experience between generations. From this grows various forms of resentment, which is further shaped by ideological propaganda. My point is, I believe that the demand for more authoritarianism comes from people who believe that culture (they grew in) is in peril and want to slow or stop the rate of its change.

It might also be a reason why people believe in God - as Dan Dennett pointed out, it's more like that people believe that belief in God is itself a good thing, rather than necessarily believing in God as an existing being. This is, again, a manifestation of the belief that some authority is required.

[dnautics]

> as young, we reluctantly defer to authority of our parents and other elders

Do you spend much time around children?

[Zachsa999]

Following this claim, a society does not need social order to fulfill the need to defer, it is just more comfortable.

[rini17]

Wolves were thought to make strict hierarchies but it was debunked. In nature they work more like family - a nonstrict hierarchy.

[njarboe]

Wolf packs work like a family because they are families. For some reason people used to believe that packs were groups of wolves from different families, but that is not the case. Maybe because feral dogs will form large packs that are not from the same families and they assumed wolves did the same thing.

[andrepd]

That's a pretty strong claim with little evidence :)

[twirligigue]

Biology or no, there are problems with living in giant hives as we do now. We simply don't know (personally) the people who rule us, so there's no question of rule by consent. We don't even know people who know them.

Dunbar's Number squared seems like the ideal population size. Enough people that some level of privacy/anonymity is possible but not so many that rule by a sociopathic elite can emerge.

[andrepd]

>The ultimate trajectory of liberal democracy is towards anarchism

Interesting you would say that, by all accounts the current trajectory of bourgeois liberal democracy is towards towards concentration of power and neo-feudalism.

[dspillett]

>* Because the 'time and effort required to maintain my privacy' part requires immediate and sustained and rigorous action and sacrifice of various comforts, all for a nebulously perceived, personally theoretical risk.*

“Maintain” and “sustained” are the key words there. The effort is constant and must be. You only have to get it wrong once, those wanting to slurp up all the data they can about you and pass it on can keep trying and trying and tying, and the effort is much less expensive to them (portioned out over the number of subjects they are tracking or attempting to track) than the counter-effort is to the individual.

[ccn0p]

> sacrifice of various comforts

Yes and I would take this even further -- Google, Facebook, and our phones, have become such an integral part of our daily (hourly) lives that to ask the average person to give up even a portion of these things or to change their habits is akin to social ostracization or educational handicapping.

[hoseja]

It's the culture since the agricultural revolution that's evolved to be inherently tyrannical.