[godelski]

> your fierce competitors had access to all your phone calls, texts, google docs, spreadsheets etc.?

I'll take this a step further into the Sci-Fi realm: what if your competitors could use all that data to model a simulation of your thoughts and generate your own ideas faster than you can?

There's a philosophical argument here as ownership of those produced thoughts are contestable. The data is from you, so do you have the rights? The machine that produced the thoughts was built by a different person and they fronted all the costs and other such things, just not the data. You can make strong arguments either way.

And to keep with the sci-fi dystopian theme, would that society stop communicating openly and watch their words carefully?

I'm dialing it up to 11, but in some respect this is possible today or in the near future. But for our scenario, let's keep it dialed to 11 and assume this is/can be perfected. (I'm not convinced this would be effective today fwiw, far too much noise)

[JohnFen]

> would that society stop communicating openly and watch their words carefully?

I think we already live in that society, to be honest.

[godelski]

I think this is starting, but I'm not sure it has been internalized. People still frequently quote Goebbels and saying "my data isn't useful." I think one key change that is happening now is that our data and decisions have really changed. For example, with the advent of LLMs I've thought of not just deleting accounts (despite being semi-anonymous) but purging them, so that my data cannot be used for future training. This is something that wasn't reasonably predictable 5-10 years ago, despite understanding the information was public and utilized for other means. Maybe we need to update how accounts are handled. On HN you can only delete your account. You can't purge and the reason was to ensure that there's a record of conversations for future readers. But the environment has changed and thus we need to weigh the threat model of privacy now vs the consistency argument.

Dang, if you're poking around, I really would be curious about your thoughts here. Are you thinking about allowing account purging due to this new environment change?

[JohnFen]

> I think this is starting, but I'm not sure it has been internalized.

Good point. But I see people doing a whole lot more self-censoring these days without even realizing they're doing it, too.

> with the advent of LLMs I've thought of not just deleting accounts (despite being semi-anonymous) but purging them, so that my data cannot be used for future training

I have removed my websites from the public web for exactly this reason, and I've heard from several others who have done the same. So, to some degree anyway, this is already happening at least at that level.

This sort of thing (self-censoring) worries me greatly, and I don't think there's anything I can do about it. The sense of powerlessness is very high sometimes.

[ianopolous]

I'm interested in the "removing your websites from the public web". Are you taking them down, putting them behind auth, or something else?

[godelski]

Ah yeah, in that context I'm agreement. Self-censoring is tricky because it can happen without people realizing it or viewing it as self-censorship. That's a good point.