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Something I read long ago (and can't find) was that privacy is a relatively recent part of humanity. In the past, we lived in small groups where everyone knew e

Something I read long ago (and can't find) was that privacy is a relatively recent part of humanity. In the past, we lived in small groups where everyone knew each other very well. Now we live in big groups, which provide pseudo-nymity. One of the things I keep coming back to in my head is a way to democratize the information collected about us. Right now, certain "people" (including companies and government organizations) have lots of access to lots of data and the rest of the population has very little access to that information. Does privacy matter as much if we share observations as humans likely did in the past?

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
Difference is these memories are no longer forgotten. Embarrassing stories may fall by the wayside back in the day, but think, your grandchildren will be able to look up your cringey college Facebook posts long after you've passed away.
- agentultra 10y ago
  You didn't have the kind of authoritarian powers we have with the ability to archive information about people. We know what the statsi archives did... now there's unprecedented power to repeat that mistake at a larger scale.
athenot 10y ago
Free sharing of information has 2 hurdles: - information asymmetry: to make things democratic & symmetric, you would have to open up information about those in enforcement. Historically there is a strong resistance to that (though transparency would be welcomed). Even if it were to work at a domestic level, the defense sector still primarily relies on security through obscurity. "National interest" then becomes a convenient way to hide things. - processing asymmetry: those who have the compute and skill to better access and correlate information will have a big advantage. Compare your ability to (hypothetically) download what you want about anyone, with an organization that houses all the data themselves and deployed Splunk/Watson/Palantir/whatever to massage that data exactly how they want.
hutzlibu 10y ago
Well, todays society would probably collapse, if suddenly someone would publish a website with everthing of everybody... (South made a fitting episode of that) I mean there are so many lies, so many things people do only in secret, like porn or drugs. By numbers both are a fundamental part of society, but only some can openly admit watching/doing it. Then all the normal lies, like what you really think about person xyz, or your boss, etc Or the persons you are attracted to besides your monogamic partner ... Or all the unsolved thieves, murders or dirty secrets of the governments .. Would probably make a big kaboom if all released at once. .. Or a rethinking about how it might be nicer to not live with all those lies, but being able to live the way we are and feel and not hiding hit so much with fake politenes etc.
- pvaldes 10y ago
  > todays society would probably collapse Probably not; reasonable doubts would emerge and in the end people pick what they want to thing and ignore quickly the rest of facts, as Wikileaks releases or climate change shown us. If everybody is caught seeing porn, people will just shrug, say something like 'mind your own bussiness' to other, and in the end nobody will care about porn. Maybe is just a question of time that this happens; so... better evil than stupid.
cossatot 10y ago
Antibiotics are pretty recent, too. As is housing with sufficient space and internal structure to not have to see and hear your parents working on your next little brother.
concinds 10y ago
This has to do with scale, and skin-in-the-game. You share things with people you trust. On a small scale, you're just a tightly knit group or community. On a large scale, you're a cog in a cyberpunk machine. In a small community, people know each other. They also know who's spreading a given rumor. People tend to have great instincts, so if the person spreading the rumor is notoriously unreliable, they'll already have acquired that reputation, and the rumor won't have sway. And people can spread rumors, but rumors can spread about them, too, so they behave. None of that is true in cybermundo. Journalists spread lies about you? Millions who'd never even heard of you before now believe them, and your life is ruined. You can't have high-trust societies on a high scale.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago

Difference is these memories are no longer forgotten. Embarrassing stories may fall by the wayside back in the day, but think, your grandchildren will be able to look up your cringey college Facebook posts long after you've passed away.

agentultra 10y ago
You didn't have the kind of authoritarian powers we have with the ability to archive information about people. We know what the statsi archives did... now there's unprecedented power to repeat that mistake at a larger scale.

athenot 10y ago

Free sharing of information has 2 hurdles: - information asymmetry: to make things democratic & symmetric, you would have to open up information about those in enforcement. Historically there is a strong resistance to that (though transparency would be welcomed). Even if it were to work at a domestic level, the defense sector still primarily relies on security through obscurity. "National interest" then becomes a convenient way to hide things. - processing asymmetry: those who have the compute and skill to better access and correlate information will have a big advantage. Compare your ability to (hypothetically) download what you want about anyone, with an organization that houses all the data themselves and deployed Splunk/Watson/Palantir/whatever to massage that data exactly how they want.

hutzlibu 10y ago

Well, todays society would probably collapse, if suddenly someone would publish a website with everthing of everybody... (South made a fitting episode of that) I mean there are so many lies, so many things people do only in secret, like porn or drugs. By numbers both are a fundamental part of society, but only some can openly admit watching/doing it. Then all the normal lies, like what you really think about person xyz, or your boss, etc Or the persons you are attracted to besides your monogamic partner ... Or all the unsolved thieves, murders or dirty secrets of the governments .. Would probably make a big kaboom if all released at once. .. Or a rethinking about how it might be nicer to not live with all those lies, but being able to live the way we are and feel and not hiding hit so much with fake politenes etc.

pvaldes 10y ago
> todays society would probably collapse Probably not; reasonable doubts would emerge and in the end people pick what they want to thing and ignore quickly the rest of facts, as Wikileaks releases or climate change shown us. If everybody is caught seeing porn, people will just shrug, say something like 'mind your own bussiness' to other, and in the end nobody will care about porn. Maybe is just a question of time that this happens; so... better evil than stupid.

cossatot 10y ago

Antibiotics are pretty recent, too. As is housing with sufficient space and internal structure to not have to see and hear your parents working on your next little brother.

concinds 10y ago

This has to do with scale, and skin-in-the-game. You share things with people you trust. On a small scale, you're just a tightly knit group or community. On a large scale, you're a cog in a cyberpunk machine. In a small community, people know each other. They also know who's spreading a given rumor. People tend to have great instincts, so if the person spreading the rumor is notoriously unreliable, they'll already have acquired that reputation, and the rumor won't have sway. And people can spread rumors, but rumors can spread about them, too, so they behave. None of that is true in cybermundo. Journalists spread lies about you? Millions who'd never even heard of you before now believe them, and your life is ruined. You can't have high-trust societies on a high scale.