[chienandalou]

To say "privacy vs. progress of mankind, pick one" is rather naive and not helpful.

If you take the aspect of watching gay porn alone: people will lose their jobs over this if their boss is conservative or they work for a conservative institution. People will lose their families or be beaten up or killed for that in fundamentalist societies or regions. Look at russia, the middle east, african countries.

And even if sexual orientation would be no problem at all in our society, perhaps in five or ten years from now that may change. All over europe right-wing political movements are rising and in the USA, well...

So, it's great that you have no problem. And yes, people should be more relaxed about watching porn. But in reality they aren't, and the decision whether someone wants other people to know about his sexual preferences or orientation has to be his and his alone.

Privacy is a human right and it's _important_. Technology should aid people in every way possible to guard their privacy, their dignity and their personal choices. To hold this as a value is not going against the progress of mankind. In fact, it's relatively easy to change technology and there is no reason at all not to do it.

e: english grammar

[TeMPOraL]

> If you take the aspect of watching gay porn alone: people will lose their jobs over this if their boss is conservative or they work for a conservative institution. People will lose their families or be beaten up or killed for that in fundamentalist societies or regions. Look at russia, the middle east, african countries.

I know, and I agree that having porn habits suddenly public worldwide will cause short-term problems there (though one could argue that sudden reveal of how common some preferences are could also force their societies to reconcile official values with reality).

> So, it's great that you have no problem. And yes, people should be more relaxed about watching porn. But in reality they aren't, and the decision whether someone wants other people to know about his sexual preferences or orientation has to be his and his alone.

Well, for one, part of the progress of mankind is people being more relaxed (that seems to be the only stable solution with good cost/benefit tradeoff).

But in general, the very notion of being able to be private seems misguided. If you really want to make revealing someone's sexual preferences his and his alone decision, you'd have to reduce human interactions to text-only chat.

Scratch that - even that wouldn't help, you could always infer stuff from prolonged conversation.

The point is, we really suck at hiding anything and it makes no sense to limit our ability to perceive and interpret the world to perserve a flawed notion of "private information".

> Privacy is a human right and it's _important_.

I'm not convinced. We give up a lot of privacy to form a society.

[chienandalou]

> (though one could argue that sudden reveal of how common some preferences are could also force their societies to reconcile official values with reality).

Fundamentalists don't care for statistics and they usually aren't very open to new ideas. Besides if they would have lists of people watching gay porn, they'd probably have a minority anyway.

> If you really want to make revealing someone's sexual preferences his and his alone decision, you'd have to reduce human interactions to text-only chat.

Of course not. Gay people in countries where they are oppressed have to hide their sexual orientation and they succeed with that. And in more open societies people decide for themselves whether they want to 'come out' to others or not. Nobody has the right to take that decision from them.

If this decision is taken away from them, it may destroy their life. And if that happens because their browsers didn't guard their privacy, the technology sucks.

> We give up a lot of privacy to form a society.

No, our society is based on the individuals' privacy. That is why we vote in secrecy and why we value a persons' liberty.

Privacy doesn't mean that everything I do is a secret. It means that I have the right to choose what I want to be a secret and what not. And I should be able to count on that, since it's a human right.

Take a look at what happens in reality. People are killed all over the world for their beliefs, their political opinions, their sexual orientation. Peoples lifes depend on their privacy. It that is taken away from them, that is totalitarianism.

[TeMPOraL]

This is a strong point in favour of privacy. I don't feel I have much to add at this point in conversation, I need to think about this issue more. Thanks for elaborating :).

> That is why we vote in secrecy

Just to address this one thing though - from what I understand, we vote in secret so that we can't be forced to vote against our will by external actors via e.g. blackmail - not because we value privacy per se. Am I wrong here?

[chienandalou]

> Just to address this one thing though - from what I understand, we vote in secret so that we can't be forced to vote against our will by external actors via e.g. blackmail - not because we value privacy per se. Am I wrong here?

No, you're right. But I'd say that we implicitly value the privacy of the voting booth as a tool to guarantee a free election.

Thanks for thinking about this. :)