[danShumway]

Your risk analysis is wrong. Your math is wrong.

What you think is a minor risk is a much larger risk than you suppose. And your analysis of the downsides of privacy improvements are wrong as well:

It takes 30 seconds to install Signal. There is no substantive benefit to Facebook's messenger not being E2EE. Privacy is not the reason why it's hard for you to get a copy of your medical records or migrate accounts across services. There is no massive substantive social benefit to advertisers tracking you across the web, and your life is not going to suddenly get worse if you install an adblocker.

This is the equivalent of putting on a bicycle helmet, getting a vaccine, wearing a seatbelt. It's not hard and it doesn't hurt you and the risks of ignoring clearly established safeguards are greater than you think. Your math is wrong.

> Stop trying to explain how your current argument isn’t what it clearly is

:D That is one way to approach a discussion, but it's not one I feel particularly obligated to take seriously or treat respectfully. I'm not really interested in having an argument about whether or not I'm lying to you when I tell you what exactly I believe. That would be a pointlessly inane, obviously unproductive waste of time.

I didn't know we were allowed to just say what the other person believes and then double down when they explain otherwise. If that kind of nonsense is allowed, then I've got to say that I think it's really weird that you've been secretly objecting to privacy on purely religious grounds the whole time :)

[Zetice]

Your argument relies on the miscalculation of risk, and now exposed you can’t even actually articulate an alternative reason why privacy is so important.

[danShumway]

> Your argument relies on the miscalculation of risk

:shrug: Six million Jews would like a word with you.

If that's not enough, consider that there might be a reason why we literally have laws preventing the requirement of disclosure of sex/race in hiring today? Consider the countless studies about how anonymity benefits the ability of oppressed groups (particularly women) to participate in public spaces online, consider that the Supreme Court has very directly said that anonymity and privacy are an essential component of 1st Amendment rights. You also still really haven't grappled with the fact that multiple states today are pushing to get access to medical records and social media messages both to prosecute people and label minority groups. These are not issues that are affecting only one or two people.

And again, the "benefit" that we're giving up by being more private is negligible. There's very little downside to encrypting messages or blocking ad networks from tracking people. The entirety of recorded human history disagrees with your risk analysis, in addition to pretty much every single 1st Amendment expert and minority advocacy/anti-hate group today. Your math is wrong.

[Zetice]

So you admit your argument is predicated on the number of people who are harmed.

What you fail to realize is I said "modern history". WWII was nearly 80 years ago, and since then, society has improved in gigantic leaps and bounds.

What happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany is no longer possible in the western world, therefore absolute privacy is unnecessary.

As I said:

> Every time in modern history western society has started down the path of outlawing some form of existence, we self correct.

[danShumway]

> So you admit your argument is predicated on the number of people who are harmed.

What, yeah, of course it is. What on earth are you talking about, which part of "your math is wrong" didn't you understand?

Lack of privacy hurts people. Not one or two people, it hurts a lot of people. It might hurt you one day. And that's worth caring about. It's worth caring about because it's a lot of people. If you didn't realize that I was talking about risk/harms then you really didn't understand a word I was saying.

Yes, I'm talking about risk. Your math about the risk is wrong. It's not a gotcha that it's apparently taken you to this point in the conversation to understand that "your math is wrong" means "your analysis of the number of people that are hurt by lack of privacy is incorrect."

> and since then, society has improved in gigantic leaps and bounds.

Society has improved slowly, via heavy investment from anonymous activists and advocates who put themselves in harms way to improve it. Every single one of those activist movements relied on privacy. Quite frankly, there really aren't many examples of social movements that have improved society that haven't heavily used privacy and anonymity to aid them. Certainly at the very least this displays a startling lack of knowledge about the history of race and gender in America.

> is no longer possible in the western world

:) Citation very, very much needed. We have a political party in America with members who are openly calling for the extermination of transgender identity, headed by a political ideologue who's currently being prosecuted for (essentially) attempting a coup. Despite that he's still favored to be the next presidential nominee of that party because the majority of that party doesn't view attempting a coup as disqualifying from office.

It is incredibly naive to believe that we are no longer capable of doing terrible things in America to oppressed identities or capable of building political and social apparatus to do those terrible things.

> Every time in modern history western society has started down the path of outlawing some form of existence, we self correct.

And as I said, that self correction is of no benefit whatsoever for the 6 million Jews that died. Self correction is not protection. Privacy is protection.

[Zetice]

You had to go back 80 years to find an example of a lack of privacy hurting enough people to make your point, and that's my point.

We don't have things like WW2 happen anymore, and living our life like the next Holocaust is just around the corner is paranoid and overly cynical.

We really did seem to learn that lesson. Your own example of trans rights is a great one; laws protecting trans people are enshrined in many US states already, and courts are annihilating many of the attempts made to the contrary.

We stumble, but we move forward, and without the loss of millions of people this time. Progress.

[thimbles]

The question isn't about whether the trans-identified have their basic rights. Of course they do, like every other citizen. It's about whether they should be granted extra rights, particularly those that override the existing rights of women.

For example, should a trans-identifying male criminal have the right to be incarcerated in women's prisons? Some female prisoners have already suffered rapes and sexual assaults from such males, in states that granted this right to the them.

[danShumway]

> You had to go back 80 years to find an example of a lack of privacy hurting enough people to make your point, and that's my point.

> Society has improved slowly, via heavy investment from anonymous activists and advocates who put themselves in harms way to improve it. Every single one of those activist movements relied on privacy. Quite frankly, there really aren't many examples of social movements that have improved society that haven't heavily used privacy and anonymity to aid them. Certainly at the very least this displays a startling lack of knowledge about the history of race and gender in America.

> If that's not enough, consider that there might be a reason why we literally have laws preventing the requirement of disclosure of sex/race in hiring today? Consider the countless studies about how anonymity benefits the ability of oppressed groups (particularly women) to participate in public spaces online, consider that the Supreme Court has very directly said that anonymity and privacy are an essential component of 1st Amendment rights. You also still really haven't grappled with the fact that multiple states today are pushing to get access to medical records and social media messages both to prosecute people and label minority groups. These are not issues that are affecting only one or two people.

I'm curious, do you have any examples at all of equal-rights movements that haven't used privacy and anonymity to help protect themselves as they accomplished their goals? Because I can't think of any. Social progress isn't magic, it happens because people make it happen, and they very often rely on privacy to protect themselves during those transitions.

Do you think we could get rid of laws banning employers from asking about race/identity on job applications and it would just be fine and there would be no downsides? We got those laws for a reason -- namely because without them there would be a huge increase in discrimination. And again, ask any anti-discrimination advocacy group whether or not anonymity matters today for protecting marginalized people.

If your opinion is that anything less than the genocide of 6 million people is no longer worth worrying about, then that is a wild perspective to have that I think the vast majority of Americans (and people in general) would disagree with. Privacy did not become irrelevant after WW2 ended.

----

> and courts are annihilating many of the attempts made to the contrary.

Citation needed. Anti-trans legislation has accelerated in many states, not deaccelerated. It's by no means certain that that the situation won't get worse. A reminder that people said "the courts will shut it down" about abortion-rights challenges too.

In the meantime, doxing and violence against transgender people is at a nearly all-time high and people are stalking doctors.

Ask the transgender community sometime whether or not they think that privacy matters for them. I guarantee they will not agree with your assessment of the situation.