All Comments on 'The End of Privacy'

Trying to interject some honest skepticism into the constant arguments for Right to Privacy. ether personal or public or from commercial and government intrusion. I have pointed out that the concept of privacy (as generally recognized within our society and culture, is a rather modern invention. And now as obsolete as an odyllic detector or blunderbuss.

Privacy as distinct from confidentiality, which are often confused together, as you and I would recognize the idea only came into it's modern usage around the fifteenth century during and in response to the Little Ice Age. Wood Fuel was expensive to collect, transport and distribute. The forests of Europe and Asia were being wiped out to feed and heat the Western and Eastern worlds.

Rebuilding housing to smaller rooms with solid doors cut down on the effort to heat them. And suddenly the Bourgeois were alone, probably for the first time in their lives. The poor of course still lived one or more multi-generational families in a one-room hovel. The wealthy/nobility were also denied private lives. From conception thru birth thru childhood and adult lives unto their deaths, inherited estates and privileges precluded any thought of ever being alone, without witnesses.

And probably, a majority of the human race still lives without privacy. Of course us entitled First Worlders are so certain in our vainglorious egotism that we confuse a temporary situation with the Laws of the Universe. Our addiction to, our adulation of our pretty, pretty shiny toys, leave us blind in our narcissism to the price for digital technology.

We can have digital technology or we can have privacy, we cannot have both. All digital tech has coded into the basic sub-routines a wealth of easily accessible meta-data. The Constitutional Right to Privacy is as obsolete as the amendments authorizing Letters of Marque or the right to own Human slaves or the Postal Service.

Actually, the USPS is an interesting part of the history of government intrusion into individual privacy. As it was from the beginning the original secret police mechanism for the Federal government. And has remained so until quite recently, as a changing world has left the USPS to slowly deteriorate along with Canals and lighthouses

In conjunction, modern credit bureaus had their beginnings with church networks to monitor the conduct of their membership and provide what confirming information there was available about new arrivals.

ass_p, you listed a lot of off the shelf items that are or will be soon available for voyeurs everywhere. But all that is already foreshadowed with obsolescence. Eventually we will see development of bio-technology, injectable before or after birth. The laws to regulate it, forbidding use on minors and restricting it to consenting adults will only last one or two generations before universal demand sweeps away all prohibitions.

Then your sweet-faced little darling great-grandchildren will run up to you, dismissively laugh at your obsolete tetraflop device and dance around singing "Live the Computer! Be the Computer! We are the Computer!"

Reading this 10, almost 11, years later:

The central prediction here failed to materialize. Even granting the basic assumption - that the proportion of men that are willing to go through the hassle of setting up and learning to fly miniature drones is large enough that every women in the wealthy world should have no reasonable expectation of privacy, the reality is that 3D printing as it was hyped 10 years ago failed to materialize. Drones mostly ended up being a fad too, aside from uses in airborne photography/cinematography and scientific research.

The other stuff did happen, but as I recall it was already there when this was written and regardless it didn't lead to the outcome described.

This work should suffice as a reminder that predictions about the future are actually about the present. If this were written today it would be about generative AI and if had been written a few years ago it would be about deepfakes.

Predictions are hard, especially about the future

-Yogi Berra