Comment by EwanG | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EwanG | Hacker News Reader

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Of course in David Brin's novel Earth (published in 1990 believe it or not), he shows a world we seem to rapidly be approaching - where privacy and secrecy are considered to be somewhat evil. Looking at the growth of Facebook and other sites where stuff that 20 years ago no one would want you to know about them is now considered great material for your "Wall", I have to wonder if the solution to the privacy problem will turn out to be no one caring? If you look at it, a lot of the privacy issue comes down to asynchronous knowledge - i.e. what you know about me that I don't know about you. If we make sure we can know virtually everything about everyone, is privacy still a problem?

Then again, does anybody really have any privacy these days, compared with 50 years ago?

All it takes is one person who knows what they're doing to find out a -LOT- about you.

Then again, did people really have privacy when living in small villages in the countryside where everybody knew each other? I think the rise of privacy came with the development of big urban areas...

There is an old Albanian movie called 14 vjeç dhëndër (14 years old groom) which shows also the privacy keeping problems they had in small villages.

There are some secrets that everyone, even in a family, keeps. People can't know if you don't tell them, but with the advent of the computerized era, information escapes even if you don't tell it.

Information can only escape if you let it escape.

I strongly disagree. There is information about you that you can't control: such as friends that share photos of you; NSA, CIA, etc, data about you; government records; etc.

The one I am concerned is not my friend sharing a photo, is the data corporations and governments capture about me (with or without me knowing about). It was said here also, if you can make an infringement of the law, never know about it, and be held guilty by data you didn't even know to exist (the example being the import of foreign cheese in the US, even for personal use).

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