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and expression of the Internet and the rich mediums we have built on it are greatly underestimated by the frankly out of date politicians and policy makers of today.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.
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.