[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.

[Zetice]

...please describe how what you've written is relevant to privacy advocacy.

[thimbles]

It's another example of the balance of rights, just as privacy rights are.

Also, the feminist activists who are advocating for women's sex-based rights are largely anonymous or pseudo-anonymous due to potential repercussions from vindictive men who oppose them. Online privacy in particular is vital for their activist movement to proceed without intimidation. It works both ways.

[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.

[Zetice]

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/federal-judge-overturns-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/us/kentucky-tennessee-tra...

From https://19thnews.org/2023/07/anti-lgbtq-laws-blocked-federal...

> "Across the country, we’re seeing a clear and unanimous rejection of these laws as unconstitutional, openly discriminatory and a danger to the very youth they claim to protect,"

We learned the lesson.

[danShumway]

10/75 is an overwhelming rejection to you? See https://translegislation.com/, bills are getting through and the pace at which they're being proposed is speeding up, not slowing down:

> 2023 marks the fourth consecutive record-breaking year for anti-trans legislation in the U.S. In just one month, the U.S. doubled the number of anti-trans bills being considered across the country from the previous year. We've seen familiar themes: attacks on gender-affirming care, education, athletics, birth certificates, religious discrimination, and other categories documented in our 2022 anti-trans legislation overview.

----

What makes this argument particularly ridiculous is -- ask every single one of these groups and advocacy fighters what they think of privacy and every single one of them will give you the same answer: it's an essential right that matters for protecting minorities. Has the ACLU stopped fighting for privacy because we've apparently defeated transphobia?

Your evidence that privacy no longer matters is an organization that spends an enormous amount of time advocating for privacy rights for exactly the reasons I mentioned above. If you're going to quote an ACLU article on the direction of transphobia, consider what they are actually saying about privacy, both in regards to transgender issues and to issues like abortion:

> As a school administrator, you have a legal obligation to maintain the privacy and safety of your students, including those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning

- https://www.aclu.org/documents/open-letter-schools-about-lgb...

> The lack of strong digital privacy protections has profound implications in the face of expanded criminalization of reproductive health care. In light of these breathtaking and authoritarian attacks on bodily autonomy, we must fight with new urgency to ensure that people maintain control over their personal information. If we fail, the repressive surveillance techniques and powers that police and prosecutors have for decades used to wage the racist wars on drugs and terrorism will be marshaled to track, catalogue, and criminalize pregnant people and those seeking basic information about reproductive health issues, putting tens of millions of people at risk of police harassment and worse.

- https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/impending-threa...

----

When you say that privacy no longer matters because we've beaten transgender discrimination, first consider checking if there are any transgender advocacy groups that agree with you. The people that you're arguing are on top of this and that will prevent us from ever doing anything horrible ever again -- they all think that privacy matters. It might be a good idea to research why they think that?