This Man Has Nothing to Hide – Not Even His Email Password

Beside social stigma, the most important barrier to living a transparent life is our reliance on secrets for identification. That includes Social Security numbers, Credit Card numbers, bank account passwords/nips, all details about physical keys and locks, etc.

You might say that public access to the above information is only a problem in conjunction with private property rights. But even if nobody owns anything, secret/public keys are currently some of the best way to identify people and track trust/reputation/opinions. Without some kind of alternative, anybody could claim anything in my name. That's problematic.

We need a way to accurately track and identify people, without the need to rely on secrets. Beside having billions of independent cameras/trackers everywhere and cross-validate their measurements, I don't know how we're going to achieve that.

However, asymmetrical information can also directly be used to obtain Power. (The simplest example is blackmail).

Asymmetrical possession of information is power. They're not cause and effect, they are the same thing.

Remember the dude who said knowledge === power? He really meant "===", not "if A then B," and not even "==" (if you use certain dynamically typed languages).

So what this guy is really saying is that he's okay with other people having unlimited power over him, so long as everyone has similarly unlimited power over everyone else, since they'll all hopefully cancel each other out. He's not just talking about the future of privacy, he's talking about the future of power. I suppose it's going to be a rather suffocating world, but at least all the animals in the farm might finally have a chance to be equal. Gotta give him credit for coming up with one of the more imaginative ways to achieve equality.

Thanks, but I'd rather live in a world where everyone has equally limited power over everyone else.

Maybe it "facilitates lying," although I think that's a rather extremist view, but if there's information I'm not willing to provide you, I may not necessarily be lying--I just don't feel that it's pertinent or necessary for you to know. Or in particularly pathological cases, I've simply forgotten, so neither of us will be privy to information that has been lost or destroyed. It's just unfortunate that it seems in this case, "lying" has been stretched to mean "lack of information or imperfect information" rather than "a statement which is not factual truth." That's not an argument I agree with.

Likewise, I'm not so sure a privacy-less world would be, or bring about, utopia. At least, thusfar, I haven't read anything that has convinced me. Yes, I'm sure part of it is due to my own experiences in our world where privacy is a norm, but I'm not sure I completely buy into the belief that privacy facilitates all of these ills spoken about in TFA (or by yourself or other commenters). For one, there will always be actors with malevolent intentions--eliminating privacy for all individuals is unlikely to change that fact.

Groupthink also comes to mind wherein opposing opinions are punished by way of mob justice. I could foresee a world where a lack of privacy encourages homogenous public opinion, either because those who might be inclined to disagree fear embarrassment or punishment.