

The Eternal Value of Privacy (2006) - yosm
https://www.schneier.com/essay-114.html

======
CurtMonash
Good post.

But it misses (or more precisely underemphasizes) an even greater point, I
believe -- the chilling effect of surveillance. There are things you don't do
because they MIGHT be used against you. Worrying about that -- even stopping
to makethat calculation -- is a tragic reduction of liberty and happiness.

------
miguelrochefort
This essay is garbage.

The argument "I don't do anything wrong, therefore I have nothing to hide" is
extremely weak. The argument for "national security" is even worse.

I'm not proud of everything I did, and there's probably some information out
there that would allow someone to arrest or blackmail me. That said, I don't
consider privacy a right and I don't believe we should pursue it. Sure,
privacy might be necessary in the short term, but once we get rid of the real
issue, privacy loses all value. The value of privacy is not eternal, and it
certainly is not intrinsic.

Publicity never was the problem. The problem comes from elsewhere. The problem
comes from us.

What do you think happens when a society surrenders most of its freedom and
power to a state? The government is not unlike us. It wants to survive, it
grows, and it gets greedy. Then, all it needs is more power, in order to keep
surviving. Where does this power comes from? Information.

Information is a form of power, and power makes anything more effective. In
this case, it's the government, which no longer exists to serve us but only to
survive. A huge part of survival is about eleminating the threats, which is
done easily when you know everything about them.

Here comes privacy. As long as we worship this beast, we will rely on privacy
to protect us, slow them down. But privacy is not a solution. It only gives us
more time. Should we spend this time fight for privacy, or should we spend it
to fight the government? I think the second option is the only real one.

Once we get rid of this beast, once it's dead. Will we keep seeking privacy?
Will we realize that communication is extremely valuable and necessary for
growth? Will we leave the hypocrisy that privacy allowed? Will we accept who
we are?

We hide because we are afraid. As long as the threat lives, fear will remain.
And the beast feeds off of fear.

By focusing on hiding, we forget about the actual problem. And it keeps
growing.

~~~
im_dario
I read some comments from you and I keep asking myself: What is your
alternative?

Corporations also want our personal data. Maybe do you imply "no government,
no corporations"?

Even in this scenario, other people want to know relevant bits about you, with
any purpose. So, don't you have right to choose what to share publicly with
them? This is privacy.

~~~
miguelrochefort
You don't have a right to information. If you don't protect your brain and it
happens to leak brainwaves (or whatever), they now belong to the public
sector. If I can capture them, I can do anything I want with the information
they contain.

All I'm saying is that you can't expect privacy. Technology will reach a point
where everything you do will be available publicly. Instead of fighting for
privacy, maybe we should eliminate what makes us seek privacy, so that we can
live in a more open and free world.

My solution is that we stop being hypocrite and blind. A lot of extremely
common things are illegal simply because we're too afraid to look at reality.
Let's be conservative and say that 25% of the population consumed marijuana
illegally at one point or another. If we applied the current laws to all of
these people, 25% of the population would have been in jail at some point.
This is simply not sustainable. Still, this is what would happen if we applied
these laws consistently. By knowing that 25% of the population consumed
marijuana illegally, we reach two possibilities. Either we arrest all these
people, or either we change the law, since it doesn't make sense in the first
place.

Until we show society that some laws and social stigma (such as racism,
homophoby, etc) don't make sense (as we would hate and jail everybody), people
will have to live in fear and obscurity.

~~~
im_dario
Sorry, I consider weak this argument. There is no relation between privacy and
your "marijuana argument".

Hypocrital laws weren't created because of need for privacy. Neither social
stigma has nothing to do with privacy.

I agree that there is a need to change a lot of laws and get rid of social
stigmas, but... To try to relate privacy with wrong behaviour (unfair laws,
stigmatization) is a false equivalence.

I won't say a thing about brainwave capturing technology. I guess it is not
easily feasible without isolating the target person, because all the
"brainiac" background noise in crowded areas.

