61–65 of 65 posts
It is complex. Personally I am not so afraid of the NSA; I know the people there have some ethics and internal controls. Do I trust them completely? No. But they are one of many threats. France, Iran, Israel, Russia, and the U.K. are just a few of countries other than the U.S. that run assassination, spycraft, 'terrorism' and other sneaky pete operations worldwide. They are threats, and so are many criminal organizat…
It's about managing risk, really. While hopefully it's fairly likely that the profiles which are being constructed based on our online habits won't negatively affect our day to day life, there's a chance that they will and that risk is worth managing. One scenario to look at is the past behaviour of other big companies during war time or during periods of authoritarian regime when the incentives align between the gov…
There's three kinds of privacy that I can see: privacy against a hacker, privacy against Google et al, and privacy against the government. The first kind I think you care about. You don't want your computer being part of a botnet. You don't want a hacker running the camera on your phone. You don't want a hacker watching as you type your password for your bank account. The second kind, privacy against Google, I can't…
You may be right that privacy may not matter any more, and/or that the battle for privacy itself is already lost. To provide an alternative approach to consider, there's always the questions of "qui bono?" and "quis custodiet ipsos custodes?". (There's are quite old questions, if the fact that they are often served in Latin wasn't a dead giveaway.) "Who benefits?" and "who observes the observers?" Are you getting eno…
You may be right that privacy may not matter any more, and/or that the battle for privacy itself is already lost. To provide an alternative approach to consider, there's always the questions of "qui bono?" and "quis custodiet ipsos custodes?". (There's are quite old questions, if the fact that they are often served in Latin wasn't a dead giveaway.) "Who benefits?" and "who observes the observers?" Are you getting eno…
You make a very compelling argument. I'm also wondering, that yes, currently our interests are aligned (privacy intrusion for value), what if they're no longer aligned?, Or what if they're compromised? Well, I'm screwed then (as others have outlined).
As for compromises, typically the assumptions in Transparency situations is that the damage is mitigated if it was already transparent (everyone already knows, or already has some other way to access that data, so compromise is less of a big deal). Admittedly, there's a lot of cultural hurdles involved to make everything transparent, including "deweaponizing" a lot of people's secrets/getting used to the fact that everyone probably has skeletons in their closet and to stop using that against each other.
I'm not even sure that full transparency could work in the real world [1], but starting from the assumption that privacy is dead anyway, transparency options seem some of the best alternatives to pursue (instead of trying to put all the monsters back into Pandora's box, let's try for hope and compromise).
[1] An interesting argument is that full transparency was the actual state of early tribal humankind. Gossip networks held tribes together. Everyone knew everyone's else's business, just because of human social dynamics and the way that we know tight-knit communities work. From that perspective privacy is a "modern" thing, and possibly even a fluke of modern civilization, though certainly many here would classify it a feature more than a bug.