Privacy is the most important concept of our time

Sure, but it was the dictatorship locking people up for wrongthink that was the problem, not the lack of privacy.

I don't think many East Germans would take the GDR back in return for guarantees that views would stay private so long as they were expressed in private...

it becomes a problem the minute there's divergence because lack of integrity undermines trust. of course, the seriousness of the problem correlates with the size of the divergence. and given that, as you rightly note, there is always going to be some degree of divergence, social responses should be informed by the degree of the divergence, and should forgive relatively trivial ones.

I think this a fantastically important topic and good post, but also misses some important things (which i dont know but there are defienitely missing ones) and focuses very much on recent tech-sphere promiment issues .

some points

-privacy is probably most important for most people in their private relationships and social life (instead of the emphasis on these recent issues)

-could be made more comprehensve/extended we have some regulations for privacy in personal relations, e.g. sexting/sex-pics publication

(that could be extended to more activities) (this is not related to the private relationships mentioned one point above)

-there is a difference between privacy for separating life/having different identities and forgiving/importantness-view-reduction of past behaviors (some european countries heavily limit prepetrator-/convicted-personal-info-transmission, mainly on the belief that this aids rehabilitation(reduces reperpetration-rates) but possibly also on the belief that then the crime is paid for/there shouldn't be further punishing for it (incl social one) but they dont approve of crime/dont see crime as a separate legitimate identity)

--it is very interesting that there seem to be no(?)/very limited norms around past-information-transmission/its legitimacy ((eg after 10 years things shouldnt be mentioned) (there are systems that deal with wrong-thought(seen as wrong) behavior like of course personal forgiving, church forgiving of sins etc that are about legitimacy of taking into account(shouldn't be (negatively) taken into account) (maybe this indirectly speaks a bit to the main subpoint indirectly because then it would also get somewhat delitimized to talk about it/continue to frequently talk about it (which could well be seen/meant to affect the talked-about person negatively) but this is then more an indirect effect)

-violence/(counter-)aggression seems to most pronounced in personal relations, e.g. people aggress/retaliate (like for other unwanted behavior) and try to reduce status of orig aggressor, eg just saying theyre bad or associating them with low-status categories (eg theyre ugly or dumb or do something (if it happens often enough probably gets turned into insult thats somewhat divorced from originally maybe somewhat seriously meant relationship-supposation, e.g. son of a whore etc)) (again by just saying that or telling negative gossip etc)

* -privacy is very important for/very important component of self-expression (and identity trying(so latter part of former ofc (so e.g. really)) * (maybe most important part why privacy matters)

-for these more politcal/abstract/not directly personal discussions something you could have specific settings like Chatham-house-rules while still maintaining productivity-oriented rules in other parts (so Chatham-house-rules for a restaurant-meetup or discord, but disturbing discussions in workplace could be brought up to HR etc) (chatham-house-rules instead of more restrictive rules like around medical privacy etc) (this is a bit work in progress)

I would even adventure to say that privacy is a human construct that doesn't really matter... why is privacy that important? when did "privacy" start to be of importance to the human been.

As a devil's advocate, if EVERYTHING, absolutely everything was public, and "common knowledge" and accepted (you sleep without clothes, oh god! scandal!) a lot of things would be easier.

Of course the fact that people are judged for their choices is what makes us value privacy... but the right thing would be for them NOT to be judged by those choices.

I understand at the basic level it is an unpopular opinion, but I submit this as a thought process on the same level that Asimov, Heinlein and other SciFi authors proposed to test our basic social assumptions.