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> Yes, we have nothing to be ashamed of I'm going to mostly side-step the de facto response to this ("surveillance isn't about shame, it's about control, etc.

> Yes, we have nothing to be ashamed of I'm going to mostly side-step the de facto response to this ("surveillance isn't about shame, it's about control, etc. etc."), because the more interesting thing here is that there's a good chance your point of view is going to become the predominant one in future generations. Generations like mine were taught that privacy was important for freedom (e.g. 1984), and even though the lesson didn't really stick with all of us, I think that there's still some clear generational divisions when it comes to privacy. Younger people seem to see this as old-fashioned, or are completely uninterested in privacy and happy to accept the tradeoffs for convenience. Year by year I'm increasingly expecting that the future won't hold some kind of social agitation for more privacy and less surveillance, it will instead have nearly complete surveillance and absence of privacy, and everyone -- or almost everyone -- will be glad for it.

desdiv 12y ago
I disagree. Public opinion polls clearly show that the younger generation is more intolerant of the NSA mass surveillance[0][1], for example. Sometimes the difference can be startling: Once again, there was a significant relationship between age group and support for monitoring everyone’s online activity. Only 15% of Canadians aged 18 to 29 believed that the Canadian government should monitor online activities if officials say it might prevent future terrorist attacks compared with 34% of those aged 30 to 44 and 43% for those aged 45 to 59.[2] That's almost a three fold difference between the 18 to 29 group and the 45 to 59 group. [0] http://www.people-press.org/2013/06/10/majority-views-nsa-phone-tracking-as-acceptable-anti-terror-tactic/ http://www.people-press.org/2013/06/10/majority-views-nsa-ph... [1] http://www.people-press.org/2013/06/17/public-split-over-impact-of-nsa-leak-but-most-want-snowden-prosecuted/ http://www.people-press.org/2013/06/17/public-split-over-imp... [2] http://abacusinsider.com/politics-public-affairs/nsa-snowden-canadians-terrorism-online-privacy/ http://abacusinsider.com/politics-public-affairs/nsa-snowden...
- thaumaturgy 12y ago
  Thanks for the studies. That's good news. I'd nitpick though that there's a substantial difference between "government surveillance to stop terrorism" and "volunteer my personal information everywhere because I get cool things for it". For instance, most Snapchat users are between the ages of 13 and 25 (according to http://www.businessinsider.com/a-primer-on-snapchat-and-its-demographics-2014-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/a-primer-on-snapchat-and-its-...).
  - desdiv 12y ago
    most Snapchat users are between the ages of 13 and 25 Isn't that an argument for the younger generation being more privacy-conscious? I.e. that they're willing to forgo the convenience of a message history in exchange for more privacy in their communications?
    - thaumaturgy 12y ago
      No. Snapchat has been under fire from several directions for a while for promising more privacy than was actually provided. They had a major account leak, there have been applications for a while that can save received photos, they got a pretty poor privacy review from the EFF... Being privacy-conscious would have to include caring at least a little bit about privacy-related news (and not just Snowden-related). sigh Maybe we're struggling a bit here because privacy can mean so many different things in different contexts. There's privacy from parents. That's something that I think young people have cared about for a long time, and that's not likely to change soon. So, Snapchat is popular. There's privacy from the government. This situation is harder to read because there are a lot of nuances. You can be politically opposed to a government spying on its own citizens without necessarily caring about personal privacy; if you distrust your government, then politically you're resistant to giving it more powers, even if you don't see how those powers might be abused. And then there's personal privacy: control over who owns information about you and what they can do with it, and that doesn't seem to be getting very much traction in younger markets. There certainly hasn't been a revolt against online services (http://www.forbes.com/sites/gyro/2014/01/09/forbes-where-are-teens-hanging-out-in-2014-hint-its-not-facebook/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/gyro/2014/01/09/forbes-where-are...), even post-Snowden, even after it's generally accepted that the business model for each of those services is to gather as much personal information about their users as possible.
      - Intermernet 12y ago
        I think the problem here, that will catch other online providers, is that snapchat's success is still based on the flawed presumption that it's actually private (by any of your definitions). Hopefully the realization that these services aren't as private as advertized will have a ripple effect in the "younger markets", but I doubt it.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
AnthonyMouse 12y ago
> I'm going to mostly side-step the de facto response to this ("surveillance isn't about shame, it's about control, etc. etc."), because the more interesting thing here is that there's a good chance your point of view is going to become the predominant one in future generations. It's not a generational thing, it's power dynamics. Keeping your secrets while learning the other guy's is to your advantage in everything from military operations to corporate trade secrets to loyalty cards used to engage in price discrimination. There are new technologies that invade privacy but also new technologies that protect it. It's going to be a long fight. What is going to become increasingly clear is that people who give up their privacy for nothing are suckers.
Futurebot 12y ago
I have a different read on that. Control doesn't work if no one cares about social opprobrium. If the culture has changed so that whatever behavior you're engaging in is no longer considered taboo / everyone else is doing it, you cannot be controlled by others using the threat of exposure against you (this doesn't apply to behaviors that are actually made illegal, so would be protestors/dissidents get no help from this.) Now, some may say that that kind of change itself is bad (due to the newer [theorized] cultural control strategy of reverse desublimation in the west since the 1960s), but I think that ship has long sailed anyway. For a basic example, let's take visible public inebriation. If large numbers / the majority of people do that on a regular basis - and everyone can see it - how could you use that as a threat against people? Right now it can be used against, for example, potential job seekers because of information asymmetry (job seeker has photo of being drunk on a public post / interviewer keeps their drunken photos private.) In a world where everyone can see everyone (and archives are infinite / searchable) that power goes away. As Brin discusses in The Transparent Society, people avoid eavesdropping (or at least hide it) because they know others are looking - and IS a behavior that gets social opprobrium, and so is effectively policed. An important (and perhaps obvious) caveat to all this is that social policing only applies to people with roughly symmetrical levels of power (i.e., this doesn't work for government surveillance - they can use much more powerful tools than shame / fear of exposure.) I think another interesting thing to think about (that we have a recent data point on) is comment sections pre- and post- Facebook comments. It was often stated in the pre- area that real names attached to posts would prevent egregious public behavior due to shame / fear. What we've seen is that this is not the case. Comment sections using Facebook comments are still often filled with much of the ugliness they had before. Is it ignorance, foolishness, feelings of invulnerability, the belief that their opinions represent a silent majority? Hard to say, but I'd like to see someone take on that topic since we now have so much data on it.
- thaumaturgy 12y ago
  > Is it ignorance, foolishness, feelings of invulnerability, the belief that their opinions represent a silent majority? Or impermanence. Who's going to give you a hard time for a comment you wrote six months ago? Two months? Two weeks? Thanks for posting. You described a lot of what I've been mulling over, but you did it way more articulately than I could've. (I'm saving it for later reference.)

desdiv 12y ago

I disagree. Public opinion polls clearly show that the younger generation is more intolerant of the NSA mass surveillance[0][1], for example. Sometimes the difference can be startling: Once again, there was a significant relationship between age group and support for monitoring everyone’s online activity. Only 15% of Canadians aged 18 to 29 believed that the Canadian government should monitor online activities if officials say it might prevent future terrorist attacks compared with 34% of those aged 30 to 44 and 43% for those aged 45 to 59.[2] That's almost a three fold difference between the 18 to 29 group and the 45 to 59 group. [0] http://www.people-press.org/2013/06/10/majority-views-nsa-phone-tracking-as-acceptable-anti-terror-tactic/ http://www.people-press.org/2013/06/10/majority-views-nsa-ph... [1] http://www.people-press.org/2013/06/17/public-split-over-impact-of-nsa-leak-but-most-want-snowden-prosecuted/ http://www.people-press.org/2013/06/17/public-split-over-imp... [2] http://abacusinsider.com/politics-public-affairs/nsa-snowden-canadians-terrorism-online-privacy/ http://abacusinsider.com/politics-public-affairs/nsa-snowden...

thaumaturgy 12y ago
Thanks for the studies. That's good news. I'd nitpick though that there's a substantial difference between "government surveillance to stop terrorism" and "volunteer my personal information everywhere because I get cool things for it". For instance, most Snapchat users are between the ages of 13 and 25 (according to http://www.businessinsider.com/a-primer-on-snapchat-and-its-demographics-2014-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/a-primer-on-snapchat-and-its-...).
- desdiv 12y ago
  most Snapchat users are between the ages of 13 and 25 Isn't that an argument for the younger generation being more privacy-conscious? I.e. that they're willing to forgo the convenience of a message history in exchange for more privacy in their communications?
  - thaumaturgy 12y ago
    No. Snapchat has been under fire from several directions for a while for promising more privacy than was actually provided. They had a major account leak, there have been applications for a while that can save received photos, they got a pretty poor privacy review from the EFF... Being privacy-conscious would have to include caring at least a little bit about privacy-related news (and not just Snowden-related). sigh Maybe we're struggling a bit here because privacy can mean so many different things in different contexts. There's privacy from parents. That's something that I think young people have cared about for a long time, and that's not likely to change soon. So, Snapchat is popular. There's privacy from the government. This situation is harder to read because there are a lot of nuances. You can be politically opposed to a government spying on its own citizens without necessarily caring about personal privacy; if you distrust your government, then politically you're resistant to giving it more powers, even if you don't see how those powers might be abused. And then there's personal privacy: control over who owns information about you and what they can do with it, and that doesn't seem to be getting very much traction in younger markets. There certainly hasn't been a revolt against online services (http://www.forbes.com/sites/gyro/2014/01/09/forbes-where-are-teens-hanging-out-in-2014-hint-its-not-facebook/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/gyro/2014/01/09/forbes-where-are...), even post-Snowden, even after it's generally accepted that the business model for each of those services is to gather as much personal information about their users as possible.
    - Intermernet 12y ago
      I think the problem here, that will catch other online providers, is that snapchat's success is still based on the flawed presumption that it's actually private (by any of your definitions). Hopefully the realization that these services aren't as private as advertized will have a ripple effect in the "younger markets", but I doubt it.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

AnthonyMouse 12y ago

> I'm going to mostly side-step the de facto response to this ("surveillance isn't about shame, it's about control, etc. etc."), because the more interesting thing here is that there's a good chance your point of view is going to become the predominant one in future generations. It's not a generational thing, it's power dynamics. Keeping your secrets while learning the other guy's is to your advantage in everything from military operations to corporate trade secrets to loyalty cards used to engage in price discrimination. There are new technologies that invade privacy but also new technologies that protect it. It's going to be a long fight. What is going to become increasingly clear is that people who give up their privacy for nothing are suckers.

Futurebot 12y ago

I have a different read on that. Control doesn't work if no one cares about social opprobrium. If the culture has changed so that whatever behavior you're engaging in is no longer considered taboo / everyone else is doing it, you cannot be controlled by others using the threat of exposure against you (this doesn't apply to behaviors that are actually made illegal, so would be protestors/dissidents get no help from this.) Now, some may say that that kind of change itself is bad (due to the newer [theorized] cultural control strategy of reverse desublimation in the west since the 1960s), but I think that ship has long sailed anyway. For a basic example, let's take visible public inebriation. If large numbers / the majority of people do that on a regular basis - and everyone can see it - how could you use that as a threat against people? Right now it can be used against, for example, potential job seekers because of information asymmetry (job seeker has photo of being drunk on a public post / interviewer keeps their drunken photos private.) In a world where everyone can see everyone (and archives are infinite / searchable) that power goes away. As Brin discusses in The Transparent Society, people avoid eavesdropping (or at least hide it) because they know others are looking - and IS a behavior that gets social opprobrium, and so is effectively policed. An important (and perhaps obvious) caveat to all this is that social policing only applies to people with roughly symmetrical levels of power (i.e., this doesn't work for government surveillance - they can use much more powerful tools than shame / fear of exposure.) I think another interesting thing to think about (that we have a recent data point on) is comment sections pre- and post- Facebook comments. It was often stated in the pre- area that real names attached to posts would prevent egregious public behavior due to shame / fear. What we've seen is that this is not the case. Comment sections using Facebook comments are still often filled with much of the ugliness they had before. Is it ignorance, foolishness, feelings of invulnerability, the belief that their opinions represent a silent majority? Hard to say, but I'd like to see someone take on that topic since we now have so much data on it.

thaumaturgy 12y ago
> Is it ignorance, foolishness, feelings of invulnerability, the belief that their opinions represent a silent majority? Or impermanence. Who's going to give you a hard time for a comment you wrote six months ago? Two months? Two weeks? Thanks for posting. You described a lot of what I've been mulling over, but you did it way more articulately than I could've. (I'm saving it for later reference.)