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Privacy is the most important concept of our time

inre.me

141–150 of 226 posts

Re: Privacy is the most important concept of our time

#141

If you think privacy is the major concern of most people then no offence, but you've had a pretty privileged life. I doubt it's even the major concern of most people in Western countries due to unemployment, poverty, debt etc. let alone developing nations which have the real risk of actual famine and so on.

Lack of privacy is the capitalists' distributed social credit system. We have thousands of companies that mine massive data to spy on people in all ways. And that data can and will be used in hiring, firing, monetary credit, clearances, customer acceptance, and more.

The hardness to maintain privacy will be used as a means of significant control over access to money in all ways.

Re: Privacy is the most important concept of our time

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thesis is pretty weak. Image boards can be visited by everyone and there are no membership cards. There isn't anything more public than that. If you think of stormfront when talking about privacy, you seem to have learned that from pretty strange sources. "Privacy cloisters extremism" is a pretty insane statement to be honest.

Image boards are inherently anonymous, though, which is the point. You're right that I used the term "private" ambiguously I guess, but your interpretation seems to be deliberately uncharitable. 4chan et. al. clearly "care about privacy"! And they're homes to objectively more extreme rhetoric than places like here where many folks use their real name.

98% of that rhetoric of indigenous population is lulz though.

Re: Privacy is the most important concept of our time

#143
post #77

If you think privacy is the major concern of most people then no offence, but you've had a pretty privileged life. I doubt it's even the major concern of most people in Western countries due to unemployment, poverty, debt etc. let alone developing nations which have the real risk of actual famine and so on.

Same you can say about global warming. Is this immediate threat? This year? Next year? In 10 years? Violation of privacy might lead to the situation that someone will be unemployed forever because of something that he or she wrote 20 years ago on Facebook or employees managed to fetch data that a person was depressed, has many kids, etc. Massive abuse of privacy will lead sooner or later to some kind corporate versio…

> Violation of privacy might lead to the situation that someone will be unemployed forever because of something that he or she wrote 20 years ago on Facebook or employees managed to fetch data that a person was depressed, has many kids, etc.

Ok but being real for a second, this is extremely difficult to imagine happening. What on earth could you write on facebook 20 years ago, short of a confession to a heinous crime, that would make you unemployable?

Re: Privacy is the most important concept of our time

#144
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same you can say about global warming. Is this immediate threat? This year? Next year? In 10 years? Violation of privacy might lead to the situation that someone will be unemployed forever because of something that he or she wrote 20 years ago on Facebook or employees managed to fetch data that a person was depressed, has many kids, etc. Massive abuse of privacy will lead sooner or later to some kind corporate versio…

It's not about immediacy of it, privacy will never be high priority to someone whose very day to day existence is uncertain and/or who already lives in a system with much worse human rights abuses, corruption and injustices (and that describes a big part of the developing world). Not saying that it's not the real threat, but it's the 1st world type of priority for many...

> Not saying that it's not the real threat, but it's the 1st world type of priority for many...

Yeah but should it be? I am from India and we really had the opportunity to nip this in the bud. This will become a problem within the next decade, and that is the day when people will have the right but not the will to say I told you so. This thinking that you should only solve problems in their immediate time is faulty. If something can be solved now with smaller effort than later, it should be solved now.

Edit: think of how we prioritize stuff in software.

Re: Privacy is the most important concept of our time

#145
post #8

The author goes too far when they suggest there should be laws (and one imagines punishments for those who break them) that prevent something being shared in one space from being shared elsewhere. For example, if I share something with my family, there should be a law that prevents a family member from making what I said public. Not only would this be a nightmare to police but it would give rise to some anti-social o…

at the very least, the speaker should probably have to indicate in some way that what they're saying is private. like if I invite you into my home and we have a discussion about the best brand of kitchen sponge, you shouldn't automatically be prohibited from sharing my recommendation with others. > If I was flat out telling my family I didn't like race X and wished that religion Y could be outlawed, and then shared i…

> perhaps it's because I'm privileged, but I don't really see how this is a problem? does it really matter if someone holds abhorrent beliefs privately if everything they do in public (and at their job) is consistent with their publicly espoused views?

If somebody has both expressed abhorrent views and made deceptive statements, why on earth would one assume they could be trusted to only act in accordance with their public statements?

Re: Privacy is the most important concept of our time

#146

No. I'd say there are a few things before. - notion of time - distance and space - experience - depth of social bonding and cultures - even magic and mysticism.. (in the days of full and unalterable data with logic processing)

" - depth of social bonding and cultures - even magic and mysticism.. (in the days of full and unalterable data with logic processing) " I think here privacy is very important as it allows identity-trying. If there is no privacy then somebody can't try different incompatible identities that they find interesting and they also need to be very careful in their current identity not to anything that is permissible in the…

Sry for replying to my own post, but i cant seem to edit my post/save the edit of my post?

(I can click edit and change the comments text (mainly wanted to improve formatting), but then when clicking "update" the (edit-)site just seems to reload Also i apparently only have two hours to edit, so it would probably be good to do it now.)

edit: I seem to be able to edit this post, but not my other, longer posts. (This posts edit-site also reloads the itself when clicking "update", but updates the post itself too.)

edit2: Sry for possible confusion. I realize it says edit somewhere in the parent comment, but that is just because i had mostly finished writing the comment when looking up the article and adding the link (but before posting the post). I can't really edit it.

Re: Privacy is the most important concept of our time

#147
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same you can say about global warming. Is this immediate threat? This year? Next year? In 10 years? Violation of privacy might lead to the situation that someone will be unemployed forever because of something that he or she wrote 20 years ago on Facebook or employees managed to fetch data that a person was depressed, has many kids, etc. Massive abuse of privacy will lead sooner or later to some kind corporate versio…

> Violation of privacy might lead to the situation that someone will be unemployed forever because of something that he or she wrote 20 years ago on Facebook or employees managed to fetch data that a person was depressed, has many kids, etc. Ok but being real for a second, this is extremely difficult to imagine happening. What on earth could you write on facebook 20 years ago, short of a confession to a heinous crime…

"It's okay to be white."

Re: Privacy is the most important concept of our time

#148
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to make light of struggling to find somewhere to live, and I know it can be difficult for many due to reasons beyond their control, and this really sucks. Everyone should have a place to live. I'm interested in exploring the hypothetical, when you say: > keep person homeless because nobody will want to rent a flat because someone's kids stained the walls in the rented apartment. If Evan's kids stain the…

Do you have kids yourself? How much control do you ultimately have over them? How long should this metric haunt you? When hearing how US credit scoring works I do not think it is a system worth striving for. This quickly becomes analogue to another HN discussion today about job opportunities for felons. That is hard threshold - it is easier just to skip them. Should we let the market forces rule freely? If not totall…

I honestly think these fears are way overblown. Is a family with kids more likely to damage an apartment or simply go to bed early? I don't think anyone has these stats, and even if they did, they probably aren't material enough to overcome the added cost of complexity and social awkwardness.

Re: Privacy is the most important concept of our time

#149
post #8

The author goes too far when they suggest there should be laws (and one imagines punishments for those who break them) that prevent something being shared in one space from being shared elsewhere. For example, if I share something with my family, there should be a law that prevents a family member from making what I said public. Not only would this be a nightmare to police but it would give rise to some anti-social o…

"And if not me, imagine a person of some power or influence: don't we want to know when someone's public political stance is different to how they really feel?"

( aside from other points: )

But it seems political positions are somewhat arbitrarily chosen within the many possible positions and position-combinations and then you also have to change in lockstemp or not? So you have two parties (or a few more in different systems) and they have largely adopted specific positions, so you have to decide on one of the two positions on a issue (e.g. democrats with high taxes dont like corporations etc -> need to be in favour of high corporate taxes instead of vat+no corporate taxes+vat and redistribution-transfers 2) and then share their specific combination (instead of pro-choice rep or pro-gun dem etc)(and there are so many positions that you have to keep track of like tax-structure (income, vat, corporate-tax(corporations are bad -> high tax etc)), abortion, guns, climate change, lgbt, religion/religious-freedom, foreign policy 1) for all these positions and then also change whats your positions somewhat in lockstep with the party (eg support/opposition for foreign inventions, sexual, crime (90s vs today etc), gun rights (like how police unions used to be in favour etc)). (But if you loo at any issue objectively/remotely (i dont mean like objectively right, but somewhat separated from partisan-/party-influence) it seems like people would get to a wide variety of positions on just one issue (just like there are hundreds of possible positions) and then an even greater variety of combinations of this variety of positions (and then againan even greater variety in changes of positions and position-combinations etc).)

Not saying it doesnt make sense to have political duopoly (of alliances) so that complicated and unclear will can be somehow translated into power/actions. But asking a politician to honestly believe what he says seems somewhat like asking them to never remotely look at things and just try to directly assimilate into him whatever polls good for some time (without really any inner thinking or critical judgement etc a bit like a robot etc)(because all that wouldnt do that would then need to resign latest at the next position-change and only would remain etc).

Re: Privacy is the most important concept of our time

#150
post #9

> It was not a time of freedom, but anarchy, where bands of barbarians could roam into your lands and pillage everything. Please, do not use anarchy as a synonym of disorder, violence or war. Pity a blog post about defining a word and an idea starts with a wrong definition of a word and an idea. i.e: Anarchy is about self governance, which theoricaly leads to more freedom than whatever we have now in most country.

Well, as I said the article is my opinion. So, let's agree to disagree. In my experience real anarchy, in the way you describe, has never been achieved. So, when I hear that it reminds me when people say that real comunism is great, it is just that the URSS was bad, fake communism (it happens here in Italy, not sure if that happens where you are). The only historical anarchy that I know is the one where there is no c…

USSR had democracy too: decisions were made per votes. Should we take that as a canonical example of democracy?

>The only historical anarchy that I know is the one where there is no control.

Do you want to say you can't live without Big Brother controlling you?

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