The problem with privacy is that there's no general consensus on what "privacy" entails. People bloviate about it being a "human right", or even a "fundamental" human right, but in reality, what we probably want is "not to be judged unfairly" and privacy is one possible means to that end.
You can't have a "right" to have other people not think about you.
For instance, no one would care about medical privacy if employers and insurance companies didn't take actions on medical conditions.
You can see this nicely illustrated in medical talk radio shows. People will call into these things and go on about all the puss and lesions and other disgusting things they have, because that's considered acceptable in that context. But normally people would be mortified if that information got out.
For instance, no one would care about medical privacy if employers and insurance companies didn't take actions on medical conditions.
I do, and so do many other people. It's very common, even in situations where employers and insurance companies aren't a consideration, for people to keep medical issues to themselves. It's common for people to present a more healthy version of themself to the world, even if asked.
People will call into these things and go on about all the puss and lesions and other disgusting things they have, because that's considered acceptable in that context. But normally people would be mortified if that information got out.
That sounds like selection bias. What proportion of the population wouldn't phone in?
Encryption deals with secrecy, though. We do talk about "private" and "public" in encryption, but that's an abuse of the terms. "Private" is shorthand meaning inside a secure perimeter, and "public" means outside the secure perimeter.
It's more interesting to differentiate the social meanings of "private" and "secret": When I send a letter in an envelope, it's private. It's not for your eyes. It might not be secret, however, because I might not mind the information in the letter being publicly revealed.
That distinction between "private" and "secret" is something the opponents of encryption forever try to erase, by claiming that things which are not secret should not be private, which has the effect of making privacy suspicious by default, instead of unremarkable. It's the snail-mail equivalent of trying to shame everyone into sending their mail using postcards, so someone who sends "a lot" of envelopes is now a target of suspicion, for some arbitrary definition of "a lot" which changes based on context.
It's still private, it is no longer a secret. It hovers somewhere between being a 'public secret' or 'public knowledge' without the general public being aware of it because it hasn't been published yet. And in that sense the real world is very much different than the web, there everything that is not explicitly protected is published.
