[WHATDOESIT]

No forced sterilization of women based on race/class/other background, for example? No exclusion from education, medical care etc? Surely?

Anyways, something like 40% of the EU citizens lived through communism, so it's not exactly unusual.

[FireSparrowWeld]

It's sad that these conversations devolve into, "A lack of privacy actually means anything generally bad that I can think of."

Kind of makes it seem like privacy itself can't stand on its own as meritous, and needs to be propped up by overgeneralizations and FUD.

[WHATDOESIT]

To me, privacy is first and foremost protection. That's from my upbringing, I guess. It's hard to argue with anything other to people who don't seem like they care about their privacy at all - and I get it, some people just don't care and trust their government etc. What else would you bring up to these people other than the bad things that have already happened due to less privacy than possible?

[JimmieMcnulty]

You could try bringing up relevant situations where a breach of privacy was the proximate cause of a systemic negative consequence on a large scale, rather than irrelevant-but-also-terrible things that weren't directly caused by a lack of privacy.

[WHATDOESIT]

You mean like when the KGB murdered my grandparent based on class origin and corporation ownership? Or the time when the Gestapo did the same to my great-grandparent, also based on ownership of the same corporation?

To me, it seems like there are much longer periods of problems than periods of peaceful life. Only 30 years out of the last 100 were in lived in relative freedom here, and still excesses are happening today. Protect yourselves people. Nobody will return your health and life back once an excess happens to you.

[JimmieMcnulty]

Again, I get that bad things happen, but none of what you've brought up would have been prevented with better privacy in practice. It's well beyond "privacy" to believe that ownership of a corporation should be hidden information, that'd be exceedingly easy to abuse.

I'm sorry those things happened to your family, but they're not relevant to a modern privacy conversation.

[WHATDOESIT]

It's nowhere beyond, it's exactly privacy. My country still (since the 90s) has numbered shares - meaning not tied to a person. The fight is not over yet, even though the EU is really trying hard to destroy all privacy here. And it's not really that simple to abuse - someone has to show up with the shares in hand to do that.

[MacsHeadroom]

No who you were talking to. But all corporate shares should be bearer shares. Corporate and income taxes are the real "abuse."

[PuppyTailWags]

> You could try bringing up relevant situations where a breach of privacy was the proximate cause of a systemic negative consequence on a large scale

The US Government directly used census data to target families and neighborhoods to send to internment camps within living memory.

Something ongoing: prosecutions are currently underway to parties who have abortions or assist in abortions based off of private correspondences such as texting, calling, or facebook messages.

[JimmieMcnulty]

So your most recent widespread example is 80+ years ago, and then a very tiny hypothetical set of lawsuits that have not been filed (zero prosecutions are "under way")?

[PuppyTailWags]

My most recent widespread example was so recently that there are people still alive who were subjected to it, yes. Regarding the other point: this is not a hypothetical set of lawsuits. People are getting prosecuted, criminally, right now.