I agree with pretty much all of the concerns you and many others have cited, and I worry about that stuff too. On the other hand, I think about the past. How much privacy did most humans have in history?
To be clear: I'm nothing like an expert on these topics.
I'm specifically not considering the wandering nomad types. I think that the vast majority of all humans who have existed lived in fairly insular communities.
So you're a member of a small town where most adults and kids work in agriculture in order to survive. The building you live in is crowded, and not just with immediate family. You sleep in the same room as a number of other people.
What privacy do you have? Cross talk/gossip moves very quickly and is pervasive. I believe if any member of this community does anything out of the norm, every member will very quickly find out about it.
I also think that most any deviance from the norm was met with, at best, suspicion.
Are you free to leave and do your own thing? Sure, but isn't that quite risky? Maybe you could join another community...maybe. But the privacy situation remains the same.
Excluding the romantic but minority cases of hearty frontier settler, and the like, I don't think humans have enjoyed much privacy at all, ever.
I'll say it again: I'm an amateur at best in these topics.
Isn't it basic human nature to, on average, form gossipy, minimally private communities?
I'm not forgetting the enormous differences between what I just described, whether it be accurate or not, and what's happening today with technology.
I'm just thinking that, perhaps, only a small percentage of all humans in history have enjoyed anything like real privacy.
PS: I'd love to receive clarifications/corrections on this from more knowledgeable folk.
One huge difference is that information to a large degree would stay within these communities. Gossip was inherently limited by the bandwidth of the jungle telegraph.
What's scary now, however, is anyone can publish any information about you, tag it to your face, and now everyone walking past you could theoretically face-search you to see any gossip about you.
Before you could travel someplace else, should you do something that required it. Now you can't go anywhere.
In earlier times you could travel somewhere else and try the same thing again, one side-effect of which was the proliferation of serial scammers.
For a good person, in a sense that covers most people, having your past reputation follow you around is a benefit, the ability to wipe out reputation only benefits those with negative reputation. Furthermore, if there's a general assumption that it will follow you around, it acts as a deterrent to avoid doing immoral things, since you won't be able to easily walk away from that.
The obvious limitation to "anyone can publish any information about you, tag it to your face" is the well-established concept of libel. Publishing false harmful information is already forbidden, but they should be able to "warn the world" if the information is truthful.
I think asymmetry plays a role here. In communities as you describe the amount of information I have is roughly equivalent to the amount of information you have.
The amount of data Google has and the amount of data a government will have gives an order of magnitude advantage to whoever gets to harness it.
If you have to collect info on someone "the old fashioned way" (like being siblings with them or marrying them) the power differential in the relationship is bounded by definition. To me, privacy is almost like a vector with two components—the level of privacy, plus the degree of intimacy of the relationship.
But the consolidation of energy (capital) and influence that allows corporate organisms to drive the "norm" has not been practiced on the scale of billions of users. "privacy" seems to be somewhat synonymous with, "finding a viable existence in parallel with the existing system." With massive-scale ability to automate who is within a norm or outside of it, avoiding an arbitrarily defined norm becomes un-viable.
I agree with pretty much all of the concerns you and many others have cited, and I worry about that stuff too. On the other hand, I think about the past. How much privacy did most humans have in history?
To be clear: I'm nothing like an expert on these topics.
I'm specifically not considering the wandering nomad types. I think that the vast majority of all humans who have existed lived in fairly insular communities.
So you're a member of a small town where most adults and kids work in agriculture in order to survive. The building you live in is crowded, and not just with immediate family. You sleep in the same room as a number of other people.
What privacy do you have? Cross talk/gossip moves very quickly and is pervasive. I believe if any member of this community does anything out of the norm, every member will very quickly find out about it.
I also think that most any deviance from the norm was met with, at best, suspicion.
Are you free to leave and do your own thing? Sure, but isn't that quite risky? Maybe you could join another community...maybe. But the privacy situation remains the same.
Excluding the romantic but minority cases of hearty frontier settler, and the like, I don't think humans have enjoyed much privacy at all, ever.
I'll say it again: I'm an amateur at best in these topics.
Isn't it basic human nature to, on average, form gossipy, minimally private communities?
I'm not forgetting the enormous differences between what I just described, whether it be accurate or not, and what's happening today with technology.
I'm just thinking that, perhaps, only a small percentage of all humans in history have enjoyed anything like real privacy.
PS: I'd love to receive clarifications/corrections on this from more knowledgeable folk.