Privacy is also about solidarity with those who do have something to hide. We want to create a society with herd immunity for dissidents, free thinkers, and even the less controversial yet somehow still controversial; fetishists, (closet) non-traditional-sexuals, or simply those who engage in behaviour that we have only learned to condone, not yet accept.
Even if you are not any of those, it is our duty to provide a thicket where the free canaries can hide from the harsh environment. When they die, we best pay close attention.
Saying “I don’t care about privacy because I have nothing to hide” is uniquely selfish, on the level of “I don’t care about gay marriage because I’m not gay.”
Several months ago I came across a website dedicated to sharing this mindset--that privacy, even if you have nothing to hide, is good for society and lets people break out of restrictive norms. I haven't been able to find it again despite a pretty long search. Do you happen to know the site I'm talking about?
I think your second quoted sentence is a perfectly fine attitude. You have to pick your fights and caring about every possible issue that may affect every possible person is a road down to insanity.
(I say this while I agree with your post otherwise.)
His quote doesn't suggest you care about gay marriage. It suggests caring about PRIVACY because for example (amongst many other examples he didn't mention) gay marriage.
More specifically, privacy is about things that you want to isolate to one sub-self and its corresponding social circle.
Everyone leads a “double life” (or N lives) to some degree, and privacy is the societal etiquette allowing for the continued separation of those lives (without having to go to the effort of using real OPSEC to isolate them.)
So much this. I don't really want my work, my online life, and my family to collide very much, but within each sphere of general influence, I want to be able to reach out and interact with people fairly openly. The best way, of course, is to carefully curate different identities online, but that feels dishonest at times and can be problematic on occasion.
> The best way, of course, is to carefully curate different identities online
Doesn’t this only work if all your interactions are online? Otherwise your family might meet your colleagues at your birthday party (or whatever you might celebrate).
No this works offline too. For example, I would think that my friends have the decency not to talk to my grandmother about my sexual preferences, even if the two happen to meet at my birthday.
Admittedly, Google+ tried with circles but sounds like a bandaid to a problem that didn't exist in the first place until Facebook along with myopic social do-gooders forced everyone to use real names online.
What's your age, sex, and race? These are questions that, in and of themselves, are not private. Any stranger on the street who sees you could immediately answer them. And if you've ever posted a picture on the net, you can add far more people. And you probably wouldn't be bothered if every single person in the world knew the answer to this question. And in fact you've probably told everybody the answer to these questions, even if indirectly, in your own posts.
Yet in spite of all of this, you probably would not want to tell me. And that's largely because I have absolutely no justification in asking or knowing this. If I said I was surveying developers, and you believed me, then you'd probably be more than willing to submit this information to me however.
Google wants to harvest massive amounts of information on me to, at best, try to get me to purchase things I otherwise would have no desire to purchase. And that is, again, at best. This is the same company that literally black-listed the term "human rights" for their proposed engine in China. [1] To imagine they won't, if they are not already, use that information for even more nefarious ends is being naive.
So on this front I couldn't care less if every disinterested person in the world knows what I had for breakfast (it was muesli), yet I would not want Google to have this information, because I don't think they are justified in knowing it. More sensitive information just ends up reaching a higher and higher standard of required minimal justification.
It doesn't sound like you disagree. You might want to be nude in front of some people (doctors, lovers, airport security), but not everyone (your barber, your boss, perfect strangers).
> Strangers, sure. Would you send one to a sexual partner?
Only if I had made up my mind that I would have no - or only a small - problem with the photo going public. I may conceivably trust the partner. I do not trust partner's ability to keep things under sufficient lock.
