Comment by giardini | Hacker News Reader

Comment by giardini | Hacker News Reader

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I would propose that

- all surveillance cease at some fixed moment and

- all information collected for a preceding fixed period (say 3 years', or maybe all of it) be made available for public inspection forever.

By "all" I mean just that - ALL information. Everything collected about everybody: presidents, prime ministers, senators & congressmen, corporations, churches, public and private institutions, trusts, public and private officials, their secretaries, clerks, bartenders and hired courtesans,etc - all of us would have our private information revealed.

This would cause an upheaval in the politics of the nation but would also provide a bonanza of invaluable information for society to review going forward. Do you want to know how corporate leaders break the law? Just look at the data and gather statistics. Are our politicians making illegal deals? Ditto. And of course, is my wife hiding something from me?

Allow prosecutions to proceed and the revealed information to be submitted as evidence. We might have to set up special courts and do triage to handle the influx of lawsuits and criminal arrests but we could at least get some of the rats out of the barn. Whether we burn the barn down or not is society's choice (doesn't seem we have a very good barn right now anyway - reminds me a bit of Animal House).

The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that privacy, as we currently know it, is a short lived phenomenon due to increased anonymity of large masses of people without the corresponding technology to accurately track information coming from them. The hundred person village of the past had little anonymity. The teeming metropoli of the future will have little as well. Privacy is information, and information moves towards more access, not less. As much as it pains me to admit it, there are parallels between privacy/surveillance and patents, copyrights and DRM, but the the roles are often reversed.

That not to say it's all bad, there are some possible upsides to a world with less privacy. For example, with the lack of any expectation of privacy for vast swaths of the average day, we may see a shift to people aligning their beliefs and actions, and that may be made easier by a shift in some of the less tolerant beliefs. This would by no means be a guaranteed, it would take work.

In the end though, I think whether privacy is somehow protected or not, one of the most important things we can do is make sure we are informed of, and inform the public of, what's likely and what's possible to have intercepted by surveillance. No matter the outcome, that's useful information for everyone to have, so they can act accordingly.

Long-term, the real issue isn't the overall level of privacy or exposure in the society, but the power-gap created by privacy-inequality.

So a post-privacy society is possible, then? Everybody having dirt on everyone else accomplishes a number of positive things.

And a number of negative ones. If someone could data-mine your "true opinions", group-think and mob-mentality becomes a much bigger issue.

Also, either extreme is primed for a big disruptive phase-change if some new technology comes along that makes it easier to conceal or uncover things.

I imagine a post-privacy society is one where people necessarily either are much more tolerant of disparate opinions, or clump together more to like-minded people in enclaves of homogeneity. Possibly a little of both.

To some degree, privacy is important because people judge bases on social norms. If that is lessened, so it the benefit of privacy (not necessarily to the same degree).

Inequality is only a temporary phenomenon because information collection, storage, and processing is too expensive to be costless to the average person. That will not always be the case.

What about in States where you have a right to Privacy?

(Alaska has an absolute right to privacy in their state constitution)

IFF loss of privacy is taken as a given (a postulate of my original comment), then socially contructed laws can at best hope to stall the loss of privacy. Whether a law is written on the books about something is irrelevant if it's impossible to enforce.

Those rights will be taken about as seriously as the EU's "right to be forgotten".

While this makes for a great piece of speculative fiction; I think you underestimate the violence that the powers that be are willing to deploy to defend the present arrangement.

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