> Privacy may actually be an anomaly. Privacy is a construct of the modern industrial age. In the past, everyone lived in small, self-contained communities where everyone knew who was dating the baker's daughter and what the sheriff had for lunch. It is only when populations started migrating en mass to cities that anonymity emerged as a by-product of urbanization.
>This, Cannataci said, was "pure, undiluted rubbish," adding: "I cannot understand how a person of the intelligence of Vint Cerf could say anything so dumb. It's just dumb."
I just finished rereading What You Can't Say. Maybe "privacy is dead" is the modern taboo?
> I've heard quite a lot of people that talk about post-privacy, and they talk about it in terms of feeling like, you know, it's too late, we're done for, there's just no possibility for privacy left anymore and we just have to get used to it. And this is a pretty fascinating thing, because it seems to me that you never hear a feminist say that we're post-consent because there is rape. And why is that? The reason is that it's bullshit.
Privacy erosion is enhanced/enabled by use of technology, but it's ultimately a social issue. This is not an us-vs-skynet situation. Our society is simply organised incorrectly; power/control over private information is misallocated and the result is a privacy hostile world.
It's not the first time we've run into this kind of power misallocation. And we've solved a variety of them: slavery, women's suffrage, segregation, gay rights, etc. We've tackled privacy before [1] in the dead-tree context. We can fix social problems, and privacy/surveillance is one for our generation to handle.
Like I responded to the parallel commenter, I think social issues are driven by technology level, not the other way around. We have privacy issues because computing and the Internet, and we may solve them if the technology allows us, but I have a feeling it won't. All of history and numerous attempts at appealing to force change in people's characters (many of them ending bloody) tells us that, sans brainwashing[0], you can't make people do something else than whatever makes sense for them in their conditions by just asking nicely.
Society seems to be reaching a stable state given a particular technology level it has. As long as giving away privacy means people can get the things they want and need easier, they will give away privacy. Most people won't give up their Facebook or e-mail, or start learning how to do PGP because some vague notion of "privacy". OTOH, if the process reaches the point when giving away privacy actually starts to hurt them in a visible way, they'll start caring.
By the way, secrecy of correspondence is just a courtesy. Your letters don't get opened on the way because you live in a prospering state where people have better things to do than read your mail and couldn't care less about you personally. It wasn't and it isn't always the case; there are still countries in which you'd better not send money in an envelope.
We may, and will, develop some limits around individual privacy that will be similar to the privacy of correspondence - i.e. just courtesy. But it's important to recognize them for what they really are.
[0] - I don't mean that in a pejorative sense, but rather in a technical one. I grew up in a religion that is pretty serious about its beliefs and values. Most of the members were sincerely trying to improve their own characters, and would rather suffer horribly than lie or steal from a stranger. I saw that it's entirely possible to rewrite even scumbags to be like sheep, willing to help and improve lives of others, but it comes at a cost of accepting a particular belief system and joining close-knit communities that frequently remind themselves of their values and reasons for following them.
I agree that technology /enables/ behaviours, but it's people who use/abuse it and the society who needs to instate the controls.
If we attack this purely from a technological angle and manage to ramp up to ubiquitous E2E encryption, society can ban encryption: jailtime for possession of data that the government can't read. Is that a technology problem or a social problem?
> Most people won't give up their Facebook or e-mail, or start learning how to do PGP because some vague notion of "privacy".
This is a defeatist attitude. There's always going to be people who don't care. What's the voter turnout rate in your country? I'm sure you can find some starving people who will pick food over privacy, or some junkies who'll pick drugs. Those people are not part of the privacy conversation because they have other priorities.
Anyhow: the goal is not to nag everybody into locking up all their personal information. The goal is (or should be) to build a society where people have control over the dissemination of their personal details/communication, rather than "everything is collected by powerful entities, deal with it".
I think you are wrong. Social processes are driving us towards less privacy and not technology.
If we consider physical strength disparity between men and women, then an average strength man could rape as many women he likes, there is no technical restriction. Yet this does not happen.
I'm becoming more and more strongly convinced that technology is what drives social processes. I.e. feudalism because agriculture, reformation because printing press, women's right movements because wars and washing machines, privacy because dirt cheap computing and the Internet.
In a way, I feel social norms are like a gas in a multi-dimensional parameter space; they expand to cover all the volume allowed by the technology we have.
> In a way, I feel social norms are like a gas in a multi-dimensional parameter space; they expand to cover all the volume allowed by the technology we have.
I'd say if anything technology is a gas that fills a space restricted by both what is technically possible (both generally and for us in particular), and our social norms [0]. The (lack of) prevalence of rape is not just a result of the technical possibility and the efficiency of law enforcement. Most people don't want to do it, just like most people don't want to be terrorists, and like at least some people genuinely don't want to spy on others (which is hard to believe for some I know).
[0] that is, our individual choices - since individuals are the only place where things like norms, laws, societies, nations and even technology actually exist, as fragments that together with other fragments in other actually existing people form shape the emergent patterns and behaviours (in the context of technology: hardly anyone, if anyone, understands everything involved in making a CPU, and that involves medicine and food and infrastructure for the workers required, I really mean everything, which for even things much simpler than a CPU is a lot).
To consider technology or other things actual agents is just false IMHO, technology doesn't do anything, and it can be pretty much be forgotten within one generation. In that sense, it's not like gas at all, it doesn't just "march on" or "expand".
Yes, of course, some social processes are made available by technology, but this is not inevitable course.
I would say that agriculture made possible the first known democracy and women rights are still subpar in many parts of the world despite the washing machines.
I wish people would taboo[0] the word "privacy" in such discussions. They often mean too many too different things; the whole discussion is done at too low resolution.
Let me approach this from a purely historical angle;
First; to make the broad generalization that "everyone lived in small self-contained communities" is frankly laughable, assuming the statement isn't taken out of a context that constrains the "everyone" in that quote. Yes, we didn't have the megacities we have today, but you certainly couldn't say "everyone would know who was dating the baker's daughter" somewhere like Pompei or Tikal.
Secondly, even if you want to argue the cities case, national/international trade has existed almost as long as established civilization. It would have been VERY easy to move among trade lanes and find a new home, if your "anonymity" had been compromised in a way you didn't like in one place. Starting with a truly clean slate in the modern age is FAR more difficult; I'd argue that we've been slowly shrinking the degree of anonymity one can re-achieve. (there is good historical precedent for movement via trade if you look at, to pull one example off the top of my head, certain trade-oriented tribes in central-south native american culture. They would regularly spread out to other small groups in which their past was as anonymous as could possibly get; there is good record of american settlers traveling with them to embed themselves in the admittedly small tribal cultures, but the size alone does not moot ones ability to seek anonymity.)
Specifically he feels that the way Vint Cerf argued may have been applicable to his culture but many others less so.
His point was that privacy was present in many of these cultures before the advent of cities and that cities did not simply invent privacy out of thin air.
That said I think a lot of this is misconstruing on both sides.
My personal opinion is privacy and an expectation of it existed well before cities or even towns and that what really come with cities was anonymity. Which is a different concept entirely.
I think it would be fair to say if you sent a rider or a pigeon so a trusted advisor you had an expectation others would not hear/read your message, this is true of the postal system and one would expect of telephone and Internet communications.
However, things get really rough when cities happened. Because of the rise of anonymity law enforcement needed new powers to actually find perpetrators of crimes. As such some privacy was sacrificed in the name of making our communities safer. Mostly in the form of allowing law enforcement some limited wire tap and post interception powers.
Unfortunately this didn't map very well to the Internet because of the nature of the 2 mediums. Intercepting someones written and spoken communications between another human is one thing. Being able to spy on what is effectively their thoughts and interests is entirely another. The bandwidth and expression of the Internet and the rich mediums we have built on it are greatly underestimated by the frankly out of date politicians and policy makers of today. They don't realise how much damage they are potentially doing to the future of such a promising system.
> However, things get really rough when cities happened
When did "cities happen"? Rome had more than a million residents about 2,000 years ago. Cities like Athens and Alexandria had over 100,000 residents centuries before that. I think I understand the point you're making, that anonymity within a community is easier to achieve when the community is large, but that's not the only anonymity available.
Before cities, we already had anonymity due to fleeting associations (e.g. nomadic groups, traveling merchants), due to separated communities (e.g. soldiers did not know each others' past, their homes would not have known their actions), or due to migration (e.g. leaving one community and joining another).
Those forms of anonymity have mostly disappeared, not because "cities happened", but because of better administration. So far, our administrative capability has always been limited by the amount of effort it required. What has changed with the Internet is that we now leave a (digital) papertrail of almost everything we do, so there is no longer an effort-based limit on the amount of records we can preserve.
That to me is what makes Cerf's comment unpalatable (I hadn't encountered it before): to pretend that "we've never had anonymity" is foolish at best, and manipulative at worst. Given his current employer, I'm more inclined towards the latter.
Another poster already commented that "what we now call privacy, used to be called freedom and liberty". I think that's a very good one-liner, but it's not really accurate: privacy is a requisite for freedom and liberty, but it's not the same thing. This is probably the first time (since the StaSi) that that requisite has come under so much attack, which is probably why it's receiving so much more attention than before.
It's (claimed to be) rubbish because thinking otherwise can be seen to weaken the privacy-champion's position. Many people have an instinct to "circle the wagons" around their personal ideological position, afraid to give an inch in case it becomes a mile.
I also think like Vint Cerf, that privacy is an artifact of modern society. I also think that since modern society is the one we find ourselves in, that privacy should be aggressively protected. Privacy is more important now than ever precisely because we're an urbanized and connected society.
I have never had a problem with an investigator hanging out somewhere writing down license plate numbers. But take issue with always-on automated license plate readers scanning where everyone is all the time. It's a difference in resources.
And to go full Godwin, the Nazis were far more effective with IBM's help.
> I also think that since modern society is the one we find ourselves in, that privacy should be aggressively protected. Privacy is more important now than ever precisely because we're an urbanized and connected society.
That's an interesting and important point I learned to appreciate in an explicit form only recently. Thank you for making it.
That said, I still don't see from a practical point, how we can expect to keep privacy and progress? The always-on automated license plate readers exist because cameras and computing power are dirt chip now, and no amount of effort sans starting a third world war and rolling us back to medieval times will revert that. Laws are weaker than technology, and the current development will make it only easier to create more complex and cheaper machines that replicate various functions of humans, only faster and better.
We could try and fight for changes in law that would make mass-scale data collection illegal, but that would not make it impossible or unfeasible - it will only limit the access to "the good guys". So criminals, creeps and government services (at least those secret ones) will keep spying on us anyway, while we would be throwing away a lot of potential improvements and scientific advancements that could be enabled by a "god's eye" view.
And so I sometimes wonder, since we can't put the genie back in the box, and fighting it only means giving up our own powers while merely inconveniencing the bad guys, maybe we should just embrace the society that's becoming self-aware and make sure this awareness is put to a good use?
ETA:
> And to go full Godwin, the Nazis were far more effective with IBM's help.
True, but I don't think we should frame it as anything else as (1930/1940) IBM helping evil people who they know were evil. The Nazis were equally more effective with help of any other country that provided them with materials they used for war.
On the other hand, we are all better off thanks to IBM, so this can't be an argument against general-purpose computing, or punchcards and identification numbers.
> That said, I still don't see from a practical point, how we can expect to keep privacy and progress?
I don't follow. How are the two mutually exclusive? Your false dichotomy between license plate readers and medieval times isn't very convincing to me.
> Laws are weaker than technology
Really? So since it is technologically possible for me to remove my license plates from my car, no judge will be able to make me put them back?
And, since it is technologically possible, it is ok for others to clean out your bank account, and you would have no redress other than to hack your money back to you?
> I don't follow. How are the two mutually exclusive? Your false dichotomy between license plate readers and medieval times isn't very convincing to me.
What is the current direction of technological progress? More computing. Faster computing. More ubiquitous computing. More connectivity. Leveraging all that for optimization. Today we have cameras so small that every one is carrying two of them in their pocket. Tomorrow, at least one of which will be replaced or augmented with a geometry scanner. Scientists want to have nanosats in orbit that will keep continuous, real-time surveillance of the planet. Can't you really see that almost everything we do now erodes privacy?
Or in more theoretical sense - every single thing you do generates ripples in reality that spread and interact with other things (generating more ripples) with the speed of light. Every thing you say or do leaves traces. Most of them escape our notice, because there's only so much things we can pay attention to. But they are still there, and with more sensors and more computing powers, we're untangling the great web of causality. Whatever is not known we can try to infer. Privacy disappears with the amount of compute we can throw at it.
> Really? So since it is technologically possible for me to remove my license plates from my car, no judge will be able to make me put them back?
You know that your car probably has several RFID tags and radio chips in various places like e.g. tires? With time it may be the case that no judge will care to make you put them back - they won't need to.
Anyway, my point does not apply to individuals, but on a large scale. Whenever a new technology arrives that is so useful/popular that lots of people start to use it, laws and customs adjust to accomodate it. Since laws and customs follow technological progress and not the other way around, it follows that laws are weaker than technology.
> Privacy may actually be an anomaly. Privacy is a construct of the modern industrial age. In the past, everyone lived in small, self-contained communities where everyone knew who was dating the baker's daughter and what the sheriff had for lunch. It is only when populations started migrating en mass to cities that anonymity emerged as a by-product of urbanization.
>This, Cannataci said, was "pure, undiluted rubbish," adding: "I cannot understand how a person of the intelligence of Vint Cerf could say anything so dumb. It's just dumb."
I just finished rereading What You Can't Say. Maybe "privacy is dead" is the modern taboo?