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.
If an evil dictator wants to get you, he will get you, with or without a census available. There are countless other ways for him to explore. Shutting down every possible avenue of global optimization because it relies on knowing stuff about people is not a way to run a civilization.
The only insurance against unrestrained power for anyone's future is restraining the power, not privacy. Privacy is what you resort to when all else fails, which even then is clearly not enough for everyone.
Protection of personal rights is not about a single solution, it is about multiple systems in a Swiss cheese model where privacy is one of those layers. Other layers are a judicial system, democratic elections etc. Stating that there are situations where one of the layers fail isn't proving anything, it is obvious that they fail some of the time. The question is if a layer adds something significant some of the time. Privacy does.
Privacy is a painkiller. It gives us the impression that the problem isn't there, but in reality it keeps getting worse until death hits.
> it is about multiple systems in a Swiss cheese model where privacy is one of those layers.
True, but acting like it is the cardinal solution for which ultimate personal freedom will emerge is a farce and is ignoring the real reasons we want privacy in the first place - we don't have the freedom of transparency b/c of legal actors over which we have little to no control.
> Stating that there are situations where one of the layers fail isn't proving anything, it is obvious that they fail some of the time
The point of pointing out the flaw is not to prove that privacy isn't important, but that it's not nearly as important as the underlying issues for which privacy still won't fix.
> The question is if a layer adds something significant some of the time. Privacy does.
Until the unchecked power discriminates based on things that can't be made private. Watch the watchman and privacy becomes a nice bonus rather than a critical component of a half-solution.
