Thanks for your reply dcow, which I won't be able to do justice to, although I look forward to an email. Oddly, I am responding to someone in another thread wh

Thanks for your reply dcow, which I won't be able to do justice to, although I look forward to an email. Oddly, I am responding to someone in another thread who considers the digital rights and privacy movement as "insignificant" and a "war that's lost". At the same time I'm trying to reconcile that with your being "sick of nutters". Bruce Schniere was early in pointing out another pendulum swing in technology, which we already know from the centralisation - decentralisation cycle, as concerning authoritarian and liberal swings. Therefore I think what we are seeing is the magnitude of the genuine backlash against abusive technologies in general. People rally around the word "privacy" as a (as you say sometimes inappropriate) totem. I agree we are in the infancy of this discussion, at least in the development community. That said, I've read over 40 contemporary books on the emerging landscape of digital rights, many written by fellow devs and computer scientists, as well as piles of classical philosophy around "tech critique", and there is a wealth of wisdom to tap into. One of the aims of my writing here is to "bring the battle to Rome", and obviously risk a very harsh audience - although I am surprised how many kindred, sceptical souls are found here on HN. A lot of it has nothing to do with "privacy" as an historical semantic, so I've pushed hard to introduce "digital dignity" as a (weaker but more useful for it) conceit. But individual harms are all around us. Just to pluck one extreme one out of the air - physical violence (indeed murder). I set my students to watch the Panorama documentary about kids who kill or maim each other over online gaming. Claims that this is an issue of scale, or that online games have changed don't ring true to me. This never used to happen for the simple reason that online anonymity was good thing in this context. In a game you could suck it up or switch it off. So in this example, over-connection of virtual to real-life spaces is a dangerous thing where people cannot maintain psychological sense of perspective. respects