As someone in that group, I don't know if I see any evidence of this generational effect. The Internet is just the latest battleground for ideologies that have always existed: consumer protection, national security, business freedom, market solutions. The same sort of thinking guides the people who call for backdoors now, who called for banning encryption in the 1990's, who called for easier access to credit card and other transactions in the 1970's, etc.
Businesses that create technological products are always going to be entities the government can control. And regulators will never be encryption utopians. They'll always be mild pragmatists willing to make compromises whose values fall moderately left or right of center on the authoritarian scale.
[0] Obviously without centralized database MITM, using software not distributed by a centralized entity that can be easily controlled as you point out.
A little off topic, but I think it is time for the USA to do a "let's go to the moon" type effort to make digital systems secure and protect privacy. I know this is a long shot though: it would take re-purposing the capabilities of the NSA (and the FBI, etc.) to making digital communication secure. Obviously this requires NO BACK DOORS, and more research into digital security. There are a lot of smart people working at the NSA and it would be good to have them working on helpful tasks like securing the Internet for businesses, the government, and individuals - and not waste time on spying on innocent people. In the 1990s the NSA and FBI did a lot of good work in this direction, but then the bogus 'war on terror' pushed them off course.
What if the entire premise of privacy being beneficial is flawed? What if the actual problem is that we build systems and processes that rely on the unsustainable idea of privacy and the wishful ability to keep secrets? Do people not see that this makes everything more fragile and likely to break?
I don't want more regulations for startups that want to analyze my genome, nor do I want to become an expert in internet security just to browse the web. Writing software is already difficult as it is, and the requirement to protect privacy makes it even more difficult and risky.
The real question is, what can we do to make living a transparent and open life possible.
My wife has an ex-boyfriend who went to prison. She was pretty terrified when there was an internet trail to our current home address (which I have since closed). Largely because of our Macy's wedding registry which showed up when you searched her name, which had my name, and there's only one of me in the US.
We know he found the registry because he emailed her about it. But he had to be a bit technical to connect the rest of the dots, and I don't think he did.
Instead of getting rid of the bad guys (or preferably get rid of incentives that motivate actions you don't agree with), you seem to be suggesting that we should hide from them. I can imagine this would lead to a world with more bad guys (because no effort exists in preventing them), a lucky minority of people who have the skills to remain hidden/unidentified (not mentionning the constant worry and utilitarian trade-offs) while letting those who don't have this chance be vulnerable to this threat.
What I hear is "let's keep marijuana consumption illegal, as long as it's easy for my fortunate white self not to get caught smoking it". No wonder so many visible minorities go to jail for crimes that white people commit just as often, ethnicity is hard to conceal. I have yet to see a movement helping black people look white so that society treats them more fairly.
One question I like to propose to those who disagree with this sentiment is as follows:
Imagine you live in a hypothetical world where all things you consider moral, just and socially acceptable were legal and societally acceptable and where everything else was illegal and societally reprehensible. What role would privacy play in such a society? What benefits would it provide?
I have yet to get a good answer to that question; if peeing in public was ok with me, everyone else and perfectly legal, what reason would I have not to do it? (You can mention shaming and whatnot, but I posit that in this hypothetical world based on my morality, if I didn't shame people, no one else would either).
tl;dr: the problem isn't privacy, the problem is law and our inability to influence it, for which our best tool for the problems that arise from our lack of influence is privacy.
Things, like say, recording the religion of someone in an open, embracing and understanding society that has full religious freedom, so you understand what your population identifies seems harmless, right?
It certainly seemed like it to the Jews in the Netherlands in the 1930s.
Sure, that hypothetical would be great for _you_ (you being the decider of morality) - but what about everyone else living in the world? It is fundamentally impossible for a world to exist where your hypothetical can be true for everyone.
Consider this - the hypothetical you describe is currently true for some set of people. And yet it ruins lives and causes misery for millions of others.
Societies rely on privacy to limit the intrusion of others into our lives. It becomes really easy to avoid enforcing a law when you can't see it happening.
For example, without privacy, sodomy laws become much easier to enforce. No longer would it be 2 closeted gay men living together happily, it would be acceptable for the government to setup a mobile array and detect that the two men were sharing a single bed, and then charge them with sodomy.
Another example. In New Zealand, prostitution is legal. However, income information and receipts are private between the business and the tax department. Visiting a prostitute is generally frowned upon publicly. So, what happens when all prostitutes are "outed", and their customer lists published? Is that a good thing? Is it just another way of making the job illegal again, with all of the societal ills that making it legal was intended to avoid?
For a US example, imagine publishing the health records from Planned Parenthood clinics - any and all. Venereal disease, birth control, abortion, anything.
I don't see how we can prevent intrusion of individuals and governments into private areas of life without a definition and expectation of privacy. Particularly when there are differing opinions on morality and what the government should do to enforce it.
And this is fucking up things big time on this planet, and maybe it's high time for it to stop.
A lot of the problems you described have nothing to do with privacy, and are entirely because general population is bunch of hypocritical children. They get scandalized. It's a hallmark of a mature person that they don't get scandalized over things, but that they seek understanding instead.
If anything, sudden and total lack of privacy would show everyone just how hypocritical people are. How many of those against sodomy laws visit prostitutes? How many of those against prostitution are homosexual? Not saying that either is wrong - my point is that what privacy does is it creates power asymmetry. I can shame you all day long for your "sins" and you can't fight back because you don't know about mine. I'm not really convinced that the solution to this problem is more privacy.
Yes, telling people to grow up is a tall order, but I hope that as a civilization, we can reach it. And then, privacy will be something that isn't really needed much, and enforcing it only makes things less efficient.
That, and of course total impossibility of getting back the pre-industrial privacy levels while retaining XXI century technology.
If both murder and sodomy are illegal to the eyes of the government, then wouldn't more accessible privacy protect both murderers and sodomists?
Clearly, the issues in the examples you describe are with the expectations of the government and its citizens. I don't want to ever have to lie about things I'm not ashamed of, and neither do I want to be ashamed of things I do. Society's foundation is Trust, and Trust starts with Honesty. We want everyone to be as honest as possible, and we should therefore change the system to motivate honesty. Only then will we have a clear picture of reality, human nature, and problems we ought to fix.
I want lying to be considered as the worst crime. I want a currency that's built on trust. I want every commitment and promises to be tracked and evaluated. I want fairness, and it starts with understanding reality.
We lie so much that we can't imagine a world without a right to it.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but are you advocating for people to make as many details of their life open and transparent on the internet because we should have nothing to hide?
Unfortunately, society is currently built in a way that coerces me into keeping secrets (i.e., private key encryption, credit card number, ridiculous laws everybody breaks because privacy makes it easy to conceal). I would much rather live in a society that's built in a way that I can be honest about myself and not lose everything in exchange.
There is no debate that one needs to keep some secrets in today's society, but unlike most of you I believe this to be a necessary evil due to the current nature of the system, not something we should strive for in the long term by making privacy more accessible.
If no one had to be punished under unjust laws for living a decent life transparently, why would privacy be beneficial?
I think you have that backwards. Privacy is a protection from the massive amount of failure states otherwise present in systems by refusing them information to operate on.
Can we build systems and processes that can protect that information from all known incentives and motivations (both commercial and socially driven). And accommodate for all unforeseen ones, in a society that already doesn't have a single set of harmonious goals?
Then that means he has it right and you might have it backwards: the problems are the massive amount of failure states for which privacy is a protection.
I've tried to put together a smartphone that simply gives me the choice: Control over my own data. It seems nearly impossible without a large investment.
On the other hand, you hurt yourself the most. You don't seem to realize that you're rejecting all social interactions that lead us where we are today. You'd rather live alone in the mountains, isolated from evil people like me that want to capture your information. You fund Kickstarter campaigns that build devices and network that willingly gets rid of everything that makes them valuable. And you don't even realize that's a problem.
What I see is a group of people that are scared. Afraid to take risks. You pick the blue pill, hoping to reduce potential losses while completely ignoring all of the gains the red pill would make possible. I can't blame you, loss aversion is a bitch that drives you blind.
http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securi...
On the other hand: I can't remember the title/author but there has absolutely been the argument floating around for a while that the problem isn't the lack of privacy it's the asymmetry of power combined with asymmetry of privacy.
If Fred goes to a certain three websites fairly regularly, and Joe (a bad guy, thug, gangster, terrorist) also goes to those three websites fairly regularly, some other authority monitoring Fred's traffic could say,"Hey, this Fred guy is following the same patterns as this other bad guy Joe, so we should probably intercept this guy and tell him we're worried he will fall into the same trap as bad guy Joe."
Who let this powerful entity exist in the first place?
https://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-...
Here is their white-paper: http://enigma.media.mit.edu/enigma_full.pdf
I am a bit skeptical on anything with blockchain in the synopsis these days.
