Ask HN: So what if my personal information gets stolen?

My parents had a criminal gang compromise their information and open up a savings account in their name. They then initiated ACH transfers from their legit accounts and filed a fraudulent income tax return in their name, to the tune of $50k refund.

The only reason they did not get away with it is that the online bank sent a gift to the house and my parents knew people from their careers that could get the attention of law enforcement quickly.

Their bank suggested that a relative probably stole their bank credentials and that it was “nothing to worry about”.

I see your 3 keywords argument above. Is that what you're referring to? ("Unsustainability", "Unenforceability", and "Inefficiency".)

I didn't see any evidence, these appear to be claims predicting the future with no support to back them up, in other words, pure opinion. In my opinion they are not compelling.

Unsustainability: Yes you can imagine small drones with cameras, but where's the actual evidence that secrets are becoming unsustainable? You can imagine all kinds of things that may or may not happen. I disagree with you. I claim that our ability to keep secrets is getting more sustainable over time, not less. Encryption and security are getting better, not worse.

Unenforceability: This is irrelevant. Yes, you can't take back secrets once leaked. That has always been true, and has nothing to do with technology or the internet. This does not amount to a reason to never try. What percent of all secrets have ever leaked? Unenforceability is only a reason to not try if all secrets inevitably leak, and only if they all leak immediately, otherwise this is a reason to try harder to keep secrets. I know for a fact that many secrets are never leaked, and many secrets that are leaked are only leaked after it no longer matters, many secrets only need to be secret temporarily, so this unenforceability point tends to undermine your argument.

Inefficiency: This argument doesn't make any sense to me. Every single thing we do would be "more efficient" if we didn't do it. It would be more efficient to not travel. It would be more efficient to not work. It would be more efficient to not eat. Efficiency is a metric that you use to measure two ways to achieve the same outcome, not something you can compare to nothing. You're completely ignoring the costs of compromised secrets in your "efficiency" calculation. When people's compromised secrets cause them to lose money or possessions or their lives, that cost is many orders of magnitude higher than the cost of keeping a secret. You're also not accounting for the efficiency of passing around public information compared to keeping information private. It's entirely possible that not keeping secrets - the costs of hosting & publishing all the previously secret information - would waste a lot more resources than the world with privacy, so it seems to me like you're just making stuff up.

So to answer your earlier question about discrimination:

1- Many people do try to keep their gender / race / religious preferences secret when online in public forums, and initially when applying to jobs.

2- Discrimination is largely a separate topic. It's a cultural problem, not a privacy issue, that people are trying to fix in various ways including affirmative action and education. Nobody is suggesting that eliminating privacy will help with discrimination, because it won't.

The existence of social prejudices does not in any way imply that my private financial situation or private correspondence or private photos should all be publicly available.

How can humanity plausibly, realistically reach a place where it's not possible to exploit any information for private gain? Because we are individuals and not a collective consciousness, I don't see how that is possible.