Living in a world without privacy

[cthulu2016]

Last edited Tue Jan 10, 2012, 12:04 AM - Edit history (5)

There’s a saying, “Live your life like is was on the front page of the New York Times.”

I agree with that, but not as intended. One way to accomplish that is to live a very dully virtuous life. The other way is to expand the range what you're comfortable seeing exposed on the front page of the New York Times.

I am a privacy fiend, civil libertarian to the core and constant critic of the aesthetic and social defects of the information-tech world. But also a realist. Technology will, in the not-too-distant future, lead to a world without privacy. Like, no privacy… at all. Every conversation will be detectable. Everything will be visible. The only limit on everyone knowing everything about everybody will be that there are not enough people to have time to care about everything about everybody.

Arthur C. Clarke and Stephan Baxter collaborated on a book called Light of Distant Days (2000) where a new technology allows people to see the photons from any perspective on Earth or in space. No nation has secrets. No corporation has secrets. No person has secrets. Eventually the technology develops to the point you can also see anything from the past. (The specific technology in the book is unlikely, but it's a metaphor.)

You can read classified memos over the presidents shoulder or watch co-workers in the shower. Watch the crucifixion and resurrection… if they happened. Watch your parents conceive you. See everything that anyone ever did… any event that ever happened. Watch what’s up on other planets, or what was up on other planets. All diplomatic double-crosses are common knowledge. On the other hand, arms treaties are readily verifiable.

What's most interesting about the book is how society reacts. At some point people just have to stop caring. At first some people turn the lights out when they go to the bathroom, for instance. Audio-only government secrets. Braille records to be read in the dark. But that cannot persist long.

Eventually people abandon the concept of privacy altogether. Do whatever you want in public because if any cared they’d watch you wherever you went. (The book's looks at the effect on sexual mores are memorable... and seem prophetic, now eleven years later.)

A major part of the book is whether the technology can be controlled. Whether is belongs to a government or is available to everyone. Like much of our technology today, the idea effectively keeping the no-secrets technology secret is impossible. If it is discovered once it will be discovered again. It cannot be contained.

Anyway, a book ahead of its time and quite provocative.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days

And why am I writing this today? This got me thinking:

http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/01/ces-2012-keeping-up-with-the-drones.php?ref=fpblg

[Louisiana1976]

1. Well said--and Light of Distant Days sounds like a good book.

[napoleon_in_rags]

2. Great post, incredibly relevant.

That's the thing about these times: Every time somebody runs for office, you have old things dug up which haunt them. The thing is nowadays, every young person who is even remotely interesting has something on them, from having everything they've ever said being recorded over twitter networks or facebook or whatever. Bring your cell phone with you to that strip club? That's in a database somewhere. So the only people fit to lead are people who have lived their lives in hermetically sealed bubbles, and know nothing about the human experience.

I am a technologist myself, and I love the premise of that book. But I think its moving in a different direction. The trend toward the cloud and centralization tells me to doubt the kind of data integrity that world requires. (I know the scifi book used a different tech, but I am talking about this world.) This new paradigm is focused on reality construction as much as reality representation. Want to spy on your neighbor? Fine, there she is, making out with Fabio. Except that she's actually reading a book alone in her kitchen. The Fabio scene is what the construct program wanted you to see, because your anticipated behavioral response is considered optimal to it.

I used to argue a lot with the atheists here. My best argument was of the (as Assange would say) "Splendide Mendax" form, that it is possible that memetically propagated ideas most favorable to the individual (or collective) are not true, they are the white lies which lead to optimal outcomes for reasons to large for the human mind to grasp in truthful rational terms. It was a way to get the atheists, but I am realizing with greater and greater horror that it may actually be true. That means that the network that wins isn't the one that reports the truth to the people on it, its the one that constructs an optimal truth for them to believe based on how they will respond and how their responses will collaborate to crush the other network.

The good news? You won't have to worry about that drunken pic on Facebook, just tell your friends you weren't actually drunk, but you're sure its what the network needed them to see.

Peace

[cthulu2016]

4. I do not believe we could live without an underlying lie

I think that any animals that acheive conciousness without a precedent delusional sense of meaning will be prone to just sit down and wait to die. (And the first computer to acheive conciousness may well promptly shut itself off.)

Depressed people make better predictions about outcomes than healthy people. Our baseline of ego satisfaction and sense of porpose is high enough that moving from that state to a more realistic perspective is (correctly) considered a disease.

[Cleita]

3. Maybe it's civilization going full circle and just going back to our tribal roots.

When we all lived in the long house, with our extended tribal family, every body was in every body's business. There was no privacy not even to have sex or birth babies.

I personally value my privacy and therefore am sometimes considered anti-social. I don't feel people need to know everything about me nor do I want to include everyone in everything I do. (Just had a falling out with a neighbor who felt she could drop in any time and stay as long as she liked. I had to tell her to call first and that I wasn't always available.) So I don't think I would have been a very good stone aged long house resident. However, it seems it's whom we are as a species.

[cthulu2016]

5. Yup. personal privacy as we think of it is

probably a farly modern concept.