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If you collect data (and create a walled garden around it through various superficial methods increasingly easier to bypass at scale, so that "only" you can access/leverage it to the fullest without having to go through such artificially erected barriers), your government can quietly collect it from you (and access/leverage it to the same extent).

If you collect data, and it was made accessible to everyone to access and leverage to the fullest if they choose, … ?:

"Information Asymmetry and Power in a Surveillance Society" http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/53109/1/MPRA_paper_53109.pdf

"This paper has engaged in a wide ranging discussion around the issues of information asymmetry in contemporary life. We have examined the relationship between such asymmetries and how power is ineluctably interrelated to such imbalances. Within this, we demonstrated how key technologies and techniques have been, and continue to be, employed to deepen and widen the information gap.

Unsurprisingly, we note that there are marked differences between those who inhabit the opposite banks – we are witnessing an entrenchment of power and information within a small, exclusive group on one side while the general population bears the weight of evermore intrusive surveillance.

One potential,and possibly democratic, move would be to ensure that knowledge is spread more equally and transparently.[…]"




If you collect data, and it was made accessible to everyone to access and leverage to the fullest if they choose, … ?:

Then the government can still use the data.

The point is not that any database has on you it's what you get when you combine the public and private history of everyone. So, suddenly a joke taken out of context or an angry x and your on the next 'no fly list'. The more information someone has the easier it is to find something they dislike even if it's simply being to normal.

It's the lost of anonymity that's important not your drunken photo's.


public and private history of everyone

That is the case now, however under the scenario that I'm putting forth (and what general societal trends are moving towards), what we call "private" today is increasingly becoming "public".

So now that joke everyone can make can still be taken out of context by everyone, but how one ends up on a no fly list or any list anyone is free to see/compile/disregard will no longer be the black box event it is now, especially if the information about people who decide (human biases involved in such decision making will be increasingly open to see for all) how one get's placed on such list becomes increasingly public or theoretically everyone would be on a no fly list because of some aspect social behavioral norms people will violate at least once in their life or because anyone is capable of making such jokes, it will become meaningless to compile such lists in the first place especially if how one becomes on such lists and those who enforce such lists are available to such potential scrutiny by everyone else.

It's the lost of anonymity

I suggest that people/organizations/governments are coming to terms that it's the lost illusion of anonymity/control over what information propagates, that was never an inherit property of the universe, but merely local maxima we have constructed from prior limitations/experience that we were (and increasingly less) constrained to for our relative existence, that now has become (and become increasingly more) something we're able to see beyond and challenge now on multiple levels now that our capabilities have shown us that our constructed ideas of reality and how things are not nearly as absolute as we have conditioned ourselves to be.

That's not to say that anonymity can not exist to any degree, even now, I think people will gain anonymity in other forms like from apathy to sifting through all the information that is increasingly more available about everyone and everything else.


Your treating privacy as a binary thing.

Classified information for example has never been completly private, but the vast majority if it is reasonably well protected.


How so? When I say "private" information is increasingly becoming "public", you assume I'm treating privacy as a binary thing?

Whether one declares information as classified or public isn't an inherit property of the information itself, and as everyone has increasingly similar access (relative asymmetry approaches 0 on a scale from 0 to 100) to information (which seems to be the direction of our collective behaviors, especially if we compare to prior times in human history), trying to classify any information in either state or on a spectrum, seems increasingly like an exercise in futility/irrelevance (to me) in the face of what we are seeing take place and the capabilities on the horizon.


The "private" vs. "public" divide is less binary than your suggesting.

Individuals, corporations, low level government workers, and the government as a collective all have differing access to different types of information. Also, it's not just pieces of information but also the ability to deal with that that's restricted. For example you might look at a few tweets, but twitter rate limits you without paying them a lot of money.

Edit: (removed redundant crap).

Sure, Russia got copy's of the design for both the first Atomic and Hydrogen bombs. So, every country with nuclear weapons can trace their designs back to those same researchers. Yet, even after 10's of thousands of people have seen them (or a derivative design) and 70 years good luck finding detailed documentation on Google.


Sure, but you would think the way you hear the media going on and on about people getting access into "types" of information they shouldn't have access to (banks pretty much consider electronic hacks apart of the cost of doing business these days), using the same tools as the people who construct such systems, its not hard to think otherwise compared to say hundreds of years ago. I mean, anyone could easily look up as list of free proxies and crawl twitter to get around the ip rate limits (or any site for that matter, people do this all the time), increasingly more than ever, people have the ability to access such information (and vasts amounts of it) more than before. Whether they feel compelled to is a different story. Same goes for the fission and fusion weapons: the physics behind it is pretty much available in every university in the world (and their online lecture notes), I just think not many people just want to build such things. And all this is pretty much within a century. Took much longer if one looks back throughout human history for knowledge of information to even propagate throughout different cultures.

Beyond that, I don't really know what to say beyond that things change. A lot of the social constructs that we are born into may be totally irrelevant in our lifetime regardless of our opinions about them, some people can adapt to such, and some people will go to their grave with cognitive dissonance of such change clinging to their memories of a world that was but will never be again.




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