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> "No privacy" has certainly NOT been the standard. Before the information age, people were more likely to communicate extremely private information in person.
by ffwd 10y ago
> "No privacy" has certainly NOT been the standard. Before the information age, people were more likely to communicate extremely private information in person.
The first problem with this is that influence and power in society is proportional to how many people a person has access to and is around in some way. So yeah you could be private before but you couldn't do nearly the same damage or have the same influence without having people around. Technology empowers people across the world while at the same time potentially leaving no trace. The second problem is that communications is one thing, but evidence and 'data at rest' is another. Things like sexual abuse pictures, financial logs like cryptocurrencies, gps coordinates of where you've been, app logs in your phone and whatever else that may serve as evidence. In the old world, you had no choice but to burn or bury that evidence, but that also eliminates their usefulness to the criminal so there's a choice to be made by them before they destroy it.
Basically in the old world you had physical items in a physical world, observed by the people around you, and your only friend was physical isolation, physical obfuscation (burying, using a safe, both of which aren't 100% private), or the decay/destruction of the physical items. Today you have pristine copies at global scale with 100% privacy and this is far more effective.