I have a similar attitude, I like openness and I try to be open as much as possible. I've always said that blogs could make our generation less psychotic than previous ones, that the increasing ability to share our feelings and thoughts with the world makes us healthier than many of our ancestors, and that increased person-to-person communication will help bring the world together.

However, I am a middle-class white male (well, I'm half Asian, but I still look "white") and I haven't done anything in particular that will get the Feds or psycho fundamentalists or looney hyperfeminists or anyone trying to harrass me. Diebold probably wishes I didn't exist, but I'm not afraid of them. If I were a persecuted minority in a place rife with persecution, or I feared some looney or powerful entity, I would place a much higher value on privacy. Privacy for me is essentially a form of self-defense. When someone has information about you, they have power over you, and if there are people you do not wish to have any power of that sort over you because they are crazy or evil, then privacy is important.

Even if you do not desire privacy for yourself in the forseeable future, making sure that privacy is preserved for the general public is in your self-interest, in case due to some unpredictable development you need the protection of privacy. Also, you should want widespread privacy, not merely privacy for privacy freaks, because if only a few people are trying to secure privacy, it is a lot easier to label them as terrorists or say things like "only criminals have something to hide". If privacy is the norm, rather than an exception, then it is a lot less dangerous to seek privacy.

I've never understood why libertarians believe they have a right to privacy. I imagine this correlates strongly with a pro-IP stance.

[quote]The privacy thing is interesting, its something a lot of libs are obsessed about but just doesn't bother me. I think part of it is whether you have the intuition that information about you is your property. Many have that intuition, and are outraged over how the info is used. I don't, and so I just don't get it.[/quote]

i think ur dad has a good explanation of it in 'future imperfect'.

David King is another person who has chosen to "Shrug".

Ah, but most people strongly feel social pressures pushing them to conform, and/or are less able to resist them than you. Thus, the loss of privacy creates a (for them) restraint on their actions that prevents them from, say, reading subversive literature or protesting something. The dystopian view is that, as more people become more and more afraid to express themselves, that what it takes to be considered a social outcast will be less and less, leading to a society of mindless clones afraid of rocking the boat.

Of course, that's mostly hysteria. But the social pressure aspect is very real, and not to be underestimated.

But on the net, nobody knows who you really are. I could claim to be as alternasexual as I wanted, and the worst I could get is scorn or derisive emails in my inbox. Physical danger to my person changes things. Also, there are a growing number of instances where people try to remove all of their online postings and purge their onlines presence because those things are starting to affect their "real" life.

I don't think that there is a flipping point where we have so much info on other people that it stops being relevant or interesting. Different will always be interesting to people, but in the future we might have to write programs to wade through the data rather than doing it by hand.

The transparent society idea fell through for me when it claimed that somehow this information based MAD would lead to goodness rather than assured destruction. Hypocrisy is too high - someone will believe themselves to be without sin and cast the first stone.

I think many people's desire for privacy from the government comes down to not wanting to be caught for whatever laws they are, might be, or might some day be breaking. Imo, it's misdirected (in as much as it is true), as it would be better to put the same energy into making the laws not in conflict with a reasonable life. E.g., there is generally a lot of "privacy" uproar over red-light cams when they go in. Question: If they simultaneously changed the law at those intersections so that a red light simply meant "yield" and you could only be ticketted for actually getting in someone's way when it wasn't your turn (or causing an accident, obviously), would there be such a fuss? (I'm sure some would still complain, but I think most would suddenly stop caring about the cams because it wouldn't impede their ability to ignore the light when the light was stupid.)

Financial privacy concerns I think are the same -- people want to be able to shelter income, etc., from taxes. (There's a big overlap between privacy advocates and tax aversionists, no?)

Consider the drug laws -- how long before a journal entry about drug use is "probable cause" enough to search their house for the drugs? When that happens, people will want to be in an uproar about how the government shouldn't be reading people's personal journals, even if they are online in plain public sight (free speech! etc. etc.), but of course the real problem is that the law disagrees with the significant percentage of the population thinks some amount of drug use is acceptable. (If I journaled that I was going to kill someone tomorrow, would it be out of line to have me followed?)

Maybe I'm missing something, but I just think most privacy concerns come down to the (probably false) hope that if the government doesn't know too much, you will be able to "escape" or "get away with it", in the event you should fall afoul of either the law or even just bureaucratic mishaps.