• 16 hours

    There are many things that should be public: laws, standards, political donations.

    Some things are beneficial when public, but are considered acceptable to be private: source code, recipes, political opinions, criminal history.

    Some things can cause significant harm if not kept private: passwords, home address, government issued id, Jewish heritage during WW2.

    “I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are.”

      • I think the disagreement or misunderstanding comes from the premise

        If we had a different world where it was impossible to lie or hide anything, then a lot of our current problems would be gone. Meanwhile a lot of new problems might come up

        In this world, if you can’t enforce that everyone stays completely open and honest, then it is in everyone’s best interest to keep certain pieces of information private

  • This ideology only works in a world where authority as a concept doesn’t exist. If humanity ever achieves a global anarchist utopia, then you can try this idea out.

    Until then, those with less power benefit immensely from hiding their identity from those with great power. Today, people in many nations live under increasingly invasive surveillance. This surveillance serves to prevent them from reacting to their material conditions (labor organizing, protesting, any sort of resistance).

    I think you might agree that anything that prevents a person from adapting to changing material conditions is a bad thing. It creates a life of suffering and oppression that is inescapable. Privacy mitigates this by allowing the oppressed to resist this effect without experiencing the retaliation of the oppressors.

    In summary, the need for privacy exists as a hedge against authoritarianism. If humanity manages to organize in such a way where that is no longer a problem, THEN this conversation might be more interesting.

  • You’re using an alias, so your first sentence is already a lie.

    But it doesn’t matter. Complete transparency would be a death sentence for all political opponents under authoritarian regimes. It would be a huge risk for them elsewhere.

    It would allow companies that control the Web infrastructures and its software to have even more power over the Internet users.

    It would make many technologies completely useless or unusable: online banking, electronic votes… Wikipedia would be dead, that would be a major setback

      • 16 hours

        With complete transparency, a corrupt government can execute any group they want (disabled, homosexual, black, immigrant, etc).

        If everyone was completely transparent about everything, a corrupt government would not be able to form. Unfortunately there are people without empathy who will hide their actions, and use other people’s information against them.

        I can’t force a government to be completely transparent, but I can save my own life by not disclosing certain information about myself to them.

        I don’t hide my bank account and password because I’ve done something wrong or I’m afraid that people will see what I’ve spent money on. I hide my bank account and password because I’m afraid that someone will take all of my money, then I’ll starve to death.

          • That’s not an ideology, that’s a dream. It’s trivially true, but it doesn’t apply to the real world. Nothing you do can bring reality closer to that, and you’ll just open yourself to harm.

              • Yeah but we’re talking about your idea now.

                We don’t need to reach utopia, but the supposed benefits of total nonprivacy only come when it’s total. Then it’ll never happen, as long as someone benefits from hiding.

                Econ 101 is about the benefits af free market. All the classes after are about why it can’t be achieved and how to deal with that.

          • 16 hours

            After that nobody would be able to hide anything

            How would you enforce that?

      • I appreciate and respect your honesty regarding your real name, but given the world we live in, I would still recommend you hide it here. I still stand corrected.

        I really don’t see how authoritarian regimes would be affected negatively (for them) by transparency?

        Regarding Wikipedia, I think a lot of contributors would hesitate to give their real name. If it was the norm, maybe the usages would be different, but I think I wouldn’t have personally contributed if I knew that people I know could find my works there. And I haven’t even done anything weird.

        For banking, secrecy is a cornerstone of the system, even IRL. What the banks manage to do IRL would still need to be done on the Internet. Public transactions IRL is unthinkable and it would be online

          • For banking, people just don’t want other people to know what they do with their money, and how much money they have. Culturally I think it would be very hard to change. Not talking about dildos and such, but what you buy is really a window into your private life. When you start having children for instance, privacy becomes very important.

            Thanks for the answers, it’s an interesting perspective even if I strongly disagree. I wish people wouldn’t downvote without giving their opinion.

  • The first thing the Nazis did when they marched into the Netherlands, the took the religious information from the citizens register to deport all Jews.

    Oppressive regimes are using information to track down dissidents and let them vanish.

    If you want to blast out every detail of your life, be m guest.

    But forcing your idea of life and safety down everyone’s throught is not the way to go.

      • They did not make any secret our of it. China does not make a secret our of it. The US no longer makes a secret out of it.

        What?

  • I think I understand the theory behind your idea, as in not that a single person or a group of people be transparent and open, but that everyone do it at the same time. It can lead to interesting discussion.

    I think it falls apart because it would also require the immediate disappearance of bad faith and mistakes. Let’s say your real name is public. A bad actor could call up your bank, tell them your name, security questions (your dog’s name or whatever, since the animal adoption records would also be public), your account number (which is already more or less public today), and get access to your money. If they don’t do it right away, call back later with even more info and socially engineer customer support to get in.

    Then there are marginalised groups of people who are in danger every day when they’re in public because of race, gender, religion, etc depending on location. If all that was public also, they’d get attacked even more on the regular.

    What about when someone is critical of a government that while public to the degree of your preference, is in a great degree of control over the population by means of public funding restriction or fines? The existence of that person or group would be inconvenient at best to them, so they could just find out everything about the group, track them down and disappear them. Yes, that would be public as well, but the rest of the population would be too scared to do anything about it.

    Also for me personally, I’m not interested in the input of other people about how I live, what I do and how I spend my money. And definitely not interested in any ads tailored to me based on my data.

      • How would that society do punishment? If someone takes all your money, the fact that it’s public wouldn’t have that much benefit. They’re publically a lot richer and you’re publically on the streets. They go to some other country or hide locally, and you’re left without anything.

        For the attacks, it’s a similar question. Once someone gets killed because of injustice or discrimination, the publicity of the act doesn’t help much anymore.

        Ads are a burden on the public even today. Even when relevant, they’re not in your interest (because the product is crap, predatory, etc). If it was in your interest, they wouldn’t need to advertise for it. Ads are engineered to hog your attention, and make you buy without inspecting the product. Watching let’s say twenty per day (which is a low number for people who don’t block), dilutes your decision making and lowers the quality of the ones you do make because you already know about a product, so why comparison shop?

          • How old are you? This seems like a relatively naive worldview, because it doesn’t take into account how crafty people can be. What if I transfer some money to you and then claim that you did it by impersonating me? There would be no provenance of what you could be capable of doing since all info is public. Of course if you’d rather keep your age to yourself that’s fine, since we’re not in that theoretical society now.

            You can absolutely kill someone without preparation, especially when emotionally or politically motivated (out in public with a strong punch, elsewhere when the opportunity arises). Check out this page on wikipedia for some material: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_of_passion

            In a better world, ads would exist to do that. However as it is, they exist to push the viewer in any way possible to buy the product. If you see something in an ad, it means that the company marketing it has enough budget taken out of manufacturing and R&D to pay for the ad. So the vast majority of the time, if you see something in an ad it means the product is not that great. (edit: Because good products don’t tend to need ads as they speak for themselves and their existence travels by word-of-mouth. Also called “organic traffic” by SEO people)

              • Your honor, it looks like I did it because @garbage_world hacked into my account.

                In a totally surveilled state, yeah you couldn’t escape. But the victim would be still dead and it wouldn’t have happened if their info was private.

                Yeah but to be fair, I’m not the one posting with “Convince me otherwise” in the title ;)

                • Oh also, there may come a time when you change your mind and decide that you’d rather be more private than you are now. Since you’re not 18 yet that’s even more important, so even if you hate privacy, please know that you still need it in our world today. You do whatever you want as far as I’m concerned but strategicaly, it’s best to not reveal as much PII as you have in other comments of this thread in the future. Not for right now, but for the future yourself. This IS an interesting theory to explore, but just in case it doesn’t work out, please leave enough security for yourself to be able to change your mind.

  • Let me guess you are straight white male with no history or worker organizing or any kind of “illegal” activity.

      • Anything that the government considers illegal, but you consider morally good.

        For example helping migrants or military deserters, organizing or participating in squats, etc.

        Even when buying weed if it is illegal where you live you see how privacy is necessary, but the point is that privacy is a tool and not doing anything illegal your whole life is a privilege, not all people will have.

      • I’d argue it’s relevant. In my state it’s illegal to cross a street anywhere that isn’t a crosswalk, but the city is not made to be walkable so there are places where you may walk an entire mile before you can cross. It’s understood by the populace and the authorities that no one is going to walk a two mile loop to get across 20ft of road. Nevertheless, I’ve committed a crime each time I do so and I’ve done it knowingly, on a few times in plain view of law enforcement who did not care.

        In your scenario I would have to self report every time do so and the officer would have to self report every time they let me. Idealistically, this will lead to a world where we assess the poor implementation of this law and rewrite it to address the nuance of the situation. Unfortunately, I’m not the first case of nuance and this law is widely understood to be unenforceable garbage. That hasn’t changed the law. Instead it would mean I’d recieve a fine in the mail each time I report and eventually the person mailing out fines will have to flag me as a flagrant repeat offender which would lead to jail time.

        Even with absolute transparency, the cheapest and most convenient option would be to jail me for crossing a street wrong and the only people that will care enough to act are my immediate family. So to ask what petty laws you may have broken is absolutely relevant to the discussion. Bureaucracies, even when crystal clear, have a way of grinding humans into pulp.

  • Another way to think about this whole privacy debate is something I see way too rarely in non-European and English-speaking communities: data protection. Sometimes you don’t care if others know this or that, but knowledge is power, and knowledge about you is power over you.

    Example: An employer might not employ you because they find out that you have mental health issues. In Germany, an employer cannot legally request this information, but if you were transparent about it from the beginning, you might have a hard time finding a job.

    https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recht_auf_Lüge

  • People deserve privacy because there are many things they want to protect, and it’s their prerogative on how much they’re willing to share.

    A lot of the things we hide could be used to hurt us if someone with malicious intent had access to them. Our account logins, our bank accounts, ways to access our houses.

          • You silly goose. 2FA is protecting the privacy of what’s inside your account. You’re essentially saying “I hate privacy but not actually because I still keep my accounts private.” Very silly. Sorry.

  • Tell us;

    • All your passwords including of your financial things like bank accounts.
    • Your family problems, sexual life style and inheritance.
    • Show us your intimate pictures.

    You hate privacy right, so you don’t need that kind of privacy either. Anyway, this seems to be more of a bait post than anything else.

      • I can’t send them in the public. If you really want them, please PM me.

        bruh

      • 16 hours

        Why would you request a private message if you hate privacy?

        • Not to condone, but just because they support an idea doesn’t mean they don’t have to follow community guidelines. I’m pretty sure they’d get banned for openly posting nudes.

          • 15 hours

            It can stand for either. But it’s a moot point. The question is why you don’t want to share this information publicly.

            Your comic is not in any way applicable to this conversation so I’m not sure why you’re sharing it. You’re not trying to improve anything.

  • 15 hours

    I wouldn’t try to convince you to hate privacy. Honestly I envy you. Being privacy-conscious is increasingly difficult, expensive, and honestly sucks a whole lot.

      • Do you believe children should be able to use the restroom and dress in private or not? Simple yes or no?

          • I’m just establishing the baseline that there is some degree of privacy which is not only expected but simply justified with intuition alone. So, there is a line somewhere. Where one draws that line may differ. Your line is no doubt extreme to many; certainly me. But some privacy is critical to a functioning society. I tend to believe that aside from those that hold public office, there is little reason not to have complete privacy.

  • 16 hours

    So, you love absolute transparency, but you hate privacy. Alright. Then you will answer my questions truthfully.

    Where do you live? How much income do you have per month? What is your bank account number? Do you use VISA or Mastercard? What is your credit card number including the expiration date and the CVC?

    And no, I am not a troll, troll.

      • 15 hours

        Alright.

        • Upload 3 photos of yourself to this thread: 1 from your shoulders and up (with your whole face clearly visible), 1 showing your profile from the shoulders and up, and 1 where we can see your whole body. All pictures must be the original files straight from the camera app with the metadata attached.
        • How tall are you in cm?
        • How much do you weight in kg?
        • What is your street address and postal code?
        • What is your phone number with the country code?
        • Are you single or married or in a relationship?
        • Why you can’t access your bank?
        • Do you have any credit card that you have money on? If yes, what are the credit card number, expiration date, and CVC of all the credit cards that you have?
        • What is the name of your bank?
        • What phone do you use, and what applications do you have installed on it?
        • Do you use Windows, Linux, or macOS?
        • What is your interests?
        • Do you have any sexual fetishes? If yes, state them all.
        • What is your sexual orientation?
        • Who is your closest friend?
        • Do you live alone?
        • Do you have any siblings?
        • Are your parents still alive?
        • What is your date of birth?
        • Have you ever got caught by the police? If yes, for what, when, for how many times, and what was the outcome (jail, fines, etc.)?
        • List your 5 favourite movies.
        • List your 5 favourite TV shows.
        • How many bills do you have per month?
        • What kind of bills do you have?
        • Name 3 people that you care the most about.

        Follow the instructions and answer all of these questions truthfully so we can build a profile of you. Since you love full transparency and hate privacy, doing all of this without any lies should be easy for you.

          • Did you ask your parents if they’re fine with you posting the address of their house? You’re not seeing adverse things in your life yet because you’re being protected by everyone around you. They might have issues with info like this being posted online. Not just the address but all that. Since you like transparency, there shouldn’t be anything blocking you from telling them and seeing if they’re okay with it.