[vitally3643]

Right, the very nature of human society for the last several thousand years has been privacy in public. You walk around outside where everyone can see you, but the societal expectation is that you don't watch others. You have conversations in public because that's where life happens, but they're still private conversations.

Every counter-example to this is people being intentionally creepy, inappropriate, or outright malicious. Which was a manageable problem when it was just a single dude being weird, society would eventually exclude and shun them. Trouble is today that we've mechanised malicious inappropriate behavior at scale and ensured we've set up our entire society and government such that the people responsible can never be held accountable in any way. So long as you're being maliciously creepy at scale (and you're wealthy) everything's fine and there's no consequences.

[dpoloncsak]

> Every counter-example to this is people being intentionally creepy, inappropriate, or outright malicious

Or you just...overhear something in public and strike up a conversation. Doesn't happen here in North-East USA often but that southern hospitality is a different animal

[dools]

I think creepiness manifests when the observation is one way. Without technology that’s kind of hard. With tech it becomes increasingly easy for everyday people to one-way spy on each other

[fwipsy]

How do you know what life was like 2000 years ago? I don't think you can truly know when this convention appeared. I suspect it's tied to urbanism at least. If you're living alone in the woods, miles from anywhere, and someone walks past your house, you're probably not going to politely ignore them.