This is a very interesting take on privacy and the direction of history. Another direction of history I'd like to compare this to is the unification of humanity

This is a very interesting take on privacy and the direction of history. Another direction of history I'd like to compare this to is the unification of humanity. No matter what our opinions on globalization, or diversity of cultures are, the humanity is inevitably moving towards one culturally homogeneous world. This may not seem obvious if we look at history on the scale of a few centuries, but it becomes apparent if we look at our entire history as species. We started with tens of thousands of completely separate "worlds" that had nothing to do with one another, and slowly, through trade and money, religion and imperial expansions we have become a single "world" without a single completely independent culture left on Earth. Slowly we are also all agreeing on moral and political values, such as "democracy", "human rights" or "equal opportunities" (incidentally, values spread across the globe by western imperial expansion). If you want to object that there are still tons of cultures left that are all so different, that's simply not true. Can you imagine Indian cuisine without chili peppers? Or the Russians/Irish without potatoes? Or the Italians without tomatoes? The whole world smokes, no culture openly accepts slavery, and so on, and so forth. And all these things and ideas were introduced just in the past few centuries, an almost negligible amount of time compared to the rest of our history. Anyways, so the idea of openness of information, free data, etc. definitely seems to be a similar force. Again, if we look at the evolution, for most of our history we lived in small bands where privacy was non-existent, the ability to gossip was what gave us a major evolutionary advantage over other species. Still, even today most of things we spend our time talking about is pure gossip (just think about the proportion of HN articles about the "celebrity" programmers going to this or that company). So this idea of privacy, secrecy, etc. is something very new and I guess only the history can show whether it'll stick or not (as you conjecture).