Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there is something bigger in play. All the various from state access to "private" communications, social networks becoming more public and all the different miscellaneous privacy issues are all different aspects or consequences of the Thing.

The move towards complete availability of all digital information seems to be a force of history. Privacy advocates are beginning to sound like copyright advocates, demanding that the universe continue providing for them in the manner to which they have grown accustomed.

Like copyright/IP, privacy is more about use getting used to (and in some cases legislating) how things happen to be, not predesigned or derived from first principle rules or morality. If 99% of your existence occurs within a community of 150 people, very little is private. When you live in a 20th center city, you get a lot of anonymity. You can keep private life (even several of these) separate from your professional life. etc. Those were just inevitable consequences of how those societies were structured.

The internet was at first an anonymous place. Pre-2000 most people seemed to share the feeling that if their real name found its way to the world wide web, serial killers would come. Then 2000-2005 people started keeping online diaries, online photo libraries, online lots of personal information. Facebook catalyzed this process with a semi private system of friends that matched what people were used to in their normal lives.

The force of history that is 'all your data available to everyone everywhere' feels unstoppable. Data is data. It doesn't care if it's an email, SMS, baby photo or GPS log. It doesn't get deleted.

Maybe "Information wants to be free" was an understatement.

I feel very awkward trying to describe this, a clear sign that I don't understand it. I wish pg Joel Spolsky, Chris Anderson (or ideally, Douglas Adams - I really wish we still had him) or someone else who's good at this sort of abstract thing would write a good piece on it.

This is a very interesting take on privacy and the direction of history. Another direction of history I'd like to compare this to is the unification of humanity.

No matter what our opinions on globalization, or diversity of cultures are, the humanity is inevitably moving towards one culturally homogeneous world. This may not seem obvious if we look at history on the scale of a few centuries, but it becomes apparent if we look at our entire history as species. We started with tens of thousands of completely separate "worlds" that had nothing to do with one another, and slowly, through trade and money, religion and imperial expansions we have become a single "world" without a single completely independent culture left on Earth. Slowly we are also all agreeing on moral and political values, such as "democracy", "human rights" or "equal opportunities" (incidentally, values spread across the globe by western imperial expansion). If you want to object that there are still tons of cultures left that are all so different, that's simply not true. Can you imagine Indian cuisine without chili peppers? Or the Russians/Irish without potatoes? Or the Italians without tomatoes? The whole world smokes, no culture openly accepts slavery, and so on, and so forth. And all these things and ideas were introduced just in the past few centuries, an almost negligible amount of time compared to the rest of our history.

Anyways, so the idea of openness of information, free data, etc. definitely seems to be a similar force. Again, if we look at the evolution, for most of our history we lived in small bands where privacy was non-existent, the ability to gossip was what gave us a major evolutionary advantage over other species. Still, even today most of things we spend our time talking about is pure gossip (just think about the proportion of HN articles about the "celebrity" programmers going to this or that company). So this idea of privacy, secrecy, etc. is something very new and I guess only the history can show whether it'll stick or not (as you conjecture).

Interesting.

No matter what our opinions on globalization, or diversity of cultures are, the humanity is inevitably moving towards one culturally homogeneous world.

In terms of geographically-based culture, which I think you mean, I agree entirely - increasing interconnectivity is causing increasing similarity between different countries. However I think there's a countercurrent to this at play too: an explosion in non-geographically-based subcultures, caused by the same increasing interconnectivity, which allows communities to maintain critical mass despite their members being geographically disparate.

Take for example, emo subculture, or hipsters, or death metal, or political activists of a thousand different kinds, a huge (and increasing) number of distinct communities: but if you go to San Francisco, or London, or Melbourne, you'll find a very similar mix.

Those cities are all extremely diverse and highly interconnected examples of course, but I think it's hard to disagree that's where things are headed globally.

There is currently a great course on Coursera named "A Brief History of Humankind"[1] that is exploring those ideas. If you have another source that goes deeper into the subject I would be interested to know it.

[1] https://www.coursera.org/course/humankind

Mostly I agree except for the statement "Privacy advocates are beginning to sound like copyright advocates, demanding that the universe continue providing for them in the manner to which they have grown accustomed".

Some copyright defenders are like that, because their fortunes depend on interfering in other people's lives and devices, or getting the government to police people for them - because that is inherently the only way copyright restrictions can be maintained.

Privacy requires just the opposite - only a freedom from interference. It does require state enforcement, particularly a ban on companies requiring personal data as a condition of business. But people can still stay off Facebook, without thereby causing any harm to anyone else.

And we can have private communications, if only government allows people to set up secure digital systems. The only things preventing privacy are government snooping and laissez-faire economics; with real democracy and regulation of exploitive business practices we'd have a better balance. (But copyright would be unenforceable.)

I think we're looking at things from fundamentally different perspectives. You're using liberal/libertarian paradigms. Your placing the government and its decisions at the center (or the beginning). I'm seeing/contending that the government here is an agent of a more fundamental force. A technological progression force, kinda.

IE, governments' access, collection & analysis of our "private data" is a sort of inevitability. One agent of an unstoppable force. BTW, governments' themselves are also victims of "private" information being accessed, collected & analyzed. That's what the wikileaks & (ironically) Snowden stuff was. Data getting free.

I'm hesitant to put my thoughts int a strong abstract statement because as I said, I don't feel like I have a good understanding of it. But "All your data available to everyone everywhere" might be where I'd start to construct it.

Once it's in gmail, Google have access to it and probably a few spy organizations. That's a few places that we know of. It will never be deleted and who knows who else will end up with it. Proliferation goes one way. It never goes back. One of these stores will eventually leak to the public like the US embassies' emails leaked to the public.

I'm claiming (hesitantly, please be nice) that I think that maybe this isn't a matter of policy or laws. It's not about what a government will decide to do. It's a tidal wave that we can't keep out. Computers store, copy and distribute information. All our information is digital. Eventually it will all get out into the wild. So if there's a photo in your phone. An email in your gmail account or a GPS log in your watch, that is future public information.

It might be more accurate to state - The move towards complete availability of all digital information for commercial gain seems to be a force of history.

Perhaps individuals are just the low-hanging fruit and these are just the early stages of the process. However it strikes me that all the forces pushing for open-ness stand to profit from it and the relationship is rather one sided at this point. Facebook, to pick the obvious example, does not seem too forthcoming with information on who has access to the data you so freely and readily provide to them and what is done with it.

Perhaps once people connect the dots and realise that the reason their life insurance premuims are going up is because they are posting too many photos of themselves drinking at parties then the pendulum will swing the other way.

Commerce is a big factor, but so is government intelligence, so is education, and and so is bottom-up social interaction.

I think the talk Bruce Schneier gave at TEDxCambridge a month ago is what you're looking for: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h0d_QDgl3gI&desktop_uri=%2Fwatc...

We see the movement in the geopolitical annexation of the Internet, as well. Brasil looking to bypass US network infrastructure, Germany's continuing struggle with loosening GEMA's grip on content, are just more stories in the slow march toward governments learning how to make the net "theirs" instead of leaving it free.

Though, obviously, the whole "Let the NGOs in the US guide and manage the world's Internet, we'll be cool and keep our hands off, honest!" argument has been blown to bits as the Internet hasn't really ever been free-and-in-the-open.

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