| > 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. |
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.