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>It's telling that the best arguments the privacy activists have are all slippery slope arguments Here's one that isnt: it's none of the government's business!

>It's telling that the best arguments the privacy activists have are all slippery slope arguments Here's one that isnt: it's none of the government's business! >the point is that I don't object to any of the actually-existing programs as currently constructed. If Gmail wants to scan my mail, I don't care. If the NSA wants to drop in on my phone calls every once in a while to see if I'm affiliated with ISIS, that's fine with me. If Facebook wants to keep a log of my activity on the site to better target ads, then they should go for it. You may not care, but I do care, and lots of other people do too. My right to privacy is inherently linked to my dignity as a human being and the neither the government, or anyone else, has the right to violate my human dignity no matter how important they think it is or how inconsequential the details of what I want to keep private are! If you have different ideas about human dignity and privacy, and you want to share all of the intimate details of your life to every government and corporate entity on the planet, more power to you. Perhaps you want to put a webcam in your bathroom, so all the people of the internet can watch you eliminate and perform your daily cleaning rituals, and you have absolutely no problem with that (many people don't!). Some of us do have a problem with that, solely for the (completely valid) reason that we value our privacy and what we do in our bathrooms is not the government's business, or facebook's business, or the business of anyone else, no matter how vehemently they claim they need to peer into our bathrooms for "national security" reasons or to target us with ads. The same goes for the rest of our lives.

dionidium 4y ago
> Perhaps you want to put a webcam in your bathroom, so all the people of the internet can watch you eliminate and perform your daily cleaning rituals, and you have absolutely no problem with that (many people don't!). Nobody is doing that. Nobody is suggesting we do that. Again, if things were different, then they'd be different, and I'd have different opinions. But things aren't different. Things are as they are. Just more evidence that every privacy argument starts with, "but what if..."
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago
  >Nobody is doing that. Nobody is suggesting we do that. You fail to understand that people who value privacy and human dignity view the NSA tapping our phones exactly the same as we view people watching us in the bathroom. There is no "what if.." - this is happening now. Our privacy and human dignity are currently being violated in a wide variety of ways.
  - dionidium 4y ago
    I understand it; it's just that it's an eccentric and unpopular worldview, so often asserted as though it's obvious and universally held. It's not obvious and it's not universally held. The burden is entirely on the privacy people to make their case.
    - StanislavPetrov 4y ago
      >eccentric and unpopular worldview The idea that women should have the same rights as men is an eccentric and unpopular worldview. The idea that slavery is wrong and immoral was an eccentric and unpopular worldview for millennia. I'm not suggesting that the right to privacy and human dignity are popular or universally held beliefs, I'm stating that the assault on privacy and human dignity is occurring right now, in contradiction to your assertion that this assault only occurs as some sort of hypothetical, slippery slope argument. We can agree to disagree over the worth of privacy and human dignity, but it is simply false to argue that the violation of privacy and human dignity is some sort of theoretical assertion about future possibilities, rather than an ongoing transgression.
      - dionidium 4y ago
        > The idea that women should have the same rights as men is an eccentric and unpopular worldview. The idea that slavery is wrong and immoral was an eccentric and unpopular worldview for millennia. Yes, and people died to get those rights, whereas the privacy advocates want to earn them by assertion. Just as it doesn't prove anything that your ideas are unpopular, it also, you know, doesn't prove anything that your ideas are unpopular. It works both ways. You've got a big case to make and the burden is on you to make it.

dionidium 4y ago

> Perhaps you want to put a webcam in your bathroom, so all the people of the internet can watch you eliminate and perform your daily cleaning rituals, and you have absolutely no problem with that (many people don't!). Nobody is doing that. Nobody is suggesting we do that. Again, if things were different, then they'd be different, and I'd have different opinions. But things aren't different. Things are as they are. Just more evidence that every privacy argument starts with, "but what if..."

StanislavPetrov 4y ago
>Nobody is doing that. Nobody is suggesting we do that. You fail to understand that people who value privacy and human dignity view the NSA tapping our phones exactly the same as we view people watching us in the bathroom. There is no "what if.." - this is happening now. Our privacy and human dignity are currently being violated in a wide variety of ways.
- dionidium 4y ago
  I understand it; it's just that it's an eccentric and unpopular worldview, so often asserted as though it's obvious and universally held. It's not obvious and it's not universally held. The burden is entirely on the privacy people to make their case.
  - StanislavPetrov 4y ago
    >eccentric and unpopular worldview The idea that women should have the same rights as men is an eccentric and unpopular worldview. The idea that slavery is wrong and immoral was an eccentric and unpopular worldview for millennia. I'm not suggesting that the right to privacy and human dignity are popular or universally held beliefs, I'm stating that the assault on privacy and human dignity is occurring right now, in contradiction to your assertion that this assault only occurs as some sort of hypothetical, slippery slope argument. We can agree to disagree over the worth of privacy and human dignity, but it is simply false to argue that the violation of privacy and human dignity is some sort of theoretical assertion about future possibilities, rather than an ongoing transgression.
    - dionidium 4y ago
      > The idea that women should have the same rights as men is an eccentric and unpopular worldview. The idea that slavery is wrong and immoral was an eccentric and unpopular worldview for millennia. Yes, and people died to get those rights, whereas the privacy advocates want to earn them by assertion. Just as it doesn't prove anything that your ideas are unpopular, it also, you know, doesn't prove anything that your ideas are unpopular. It works both ways. You've got a big case to make and the burden is on you to make it.