(I don't know enough French to discuss this matter, let's stick to English)
All the people I have met who resort to the "nothing to hide" paradigm were older than 65.these people don't have Facebook or smartphones, and they don't realize that their cars, insurance records and financial transactions are all being tracked. They do not understand the sensitivity of meta data or social graphs, nor do they care. They have their life in order, and surveillance doesn't take anything away from them. The fear of terrorism is a lot more substantial at their points in life.
I don't know about discourse in France - I can imagine that hell just broke loose after the recent attacks. Here in Germany, it's very much a generation problem. Those who care about civil rights and an active democracy are young, and young educated people are a minority. Old people are heavily catered to by the governing parties, and they all seem to love surveillance, most being lucky enough to never have experienced the downsides.
This fight feels a lot like the gay rights movement. Preconceptions are impossible to overcome, all you can do is wait for twenty years until you have a sizeable part of the population behind you, and then start an uproar. In the meantime, it doesn't help to, say, explain how small the aids propagation rate is. Nobody cares.
That depends on geographical and historical context. In my country (ex-Soviet Union), the opposite is true. Older people, who have experienced what totalitarianism and mass surveillance is (thanks to KGB), are very pro-privacy. My grandmother still tears up every single letter to the small pieces before dumping it, even though that's a casual utility bill. On the other hand, youth, that are used to share all their life details on Facebook, Twitter and whatnot, are mostly of "I have nothing to hide" attitude. Only minority of young people (usually more technically literate) understand how important privacy is and how powerful information can be.
I'm German and I'd argue the complete opposite way. Older people here are totally more privacy aware than young people / my generation that haven't witnessed the Stasi.
I'm from Poland, living in UK. In Poland, older people value privacy a lot, because they remember communism, secret police and censorship, while young people don't care as much. In UK, I've heard multiple times from older people that they don't care about privacy and that they trust the government 100%, while young people are more privacy conscious.
I'm a software developer in training from west Germany. We discussed this "nothing to hide" topic in our class (ages about 17 - 30) and about half of them didn't care or even appreciated surveillance.
I wonder if you and hengheng are on opposite sides of the country? My favorite physicist I've worked with had a fascinating viewpoint on how his life changed when the wall fell.
Hell did not break loose in France after Charlie Hebdo.
They had huge rallies in support of freedom of speech. And they were joined by all religions and political factions. All in all, democracy and societal harmony prevailed.
By the way, you are German and think the older generation has no problem with surveillance? What about the experiences made in Eastern Germany? 1989 is not far into the past, you know.
Alas, old western Germans are not as sensitive to the Stasi in this day and age as their counterparts in the East may appear to be - although Germany likes to think of itself an open culture, there is much that is still very insular about the German body politic.
And then there's the fact that the German people have been living in a society dominated by a non-sovereign intelligence agency since the end of WW2, a fact which won't change any time soon. The USA actually runs German intelligence agencies; if anything, Germany is the testing ground for new forms of societal control that the American TLA's can implement in their own realm. Slowly, over a period of time unnoticeable by the average bourgeoisie...
This thread created many accounts of viewpoints opposite to mine, reporting how the younger generation loves to share everything with the panopticon, while the older generation is highly averse after to their experiences with Stasi 1.0. I'm happy to be proven wrong.
The conservative older people around me (e.g. family and their peers) all share the perspective I described, and that's all I have to qualify my statement. They are also all conservative or FDP voters. Weirdly enough, even those from Saxony or Thuringia didn't realize the Stasi analogy.
"Today no-one has their eyes on me, it's all just machines" was the most common sentiment I heard from them. Which might actually be a common stance ... across all generations.
sadly enough, my own mother is facebook addict, sharing everything personal on iCloud, gmail or Facebook. When I warn her about that she even gave the "got nothing to hide" argument, with the "if they got money/time to loose on me sharing pics of my cats, good for them!"...
whereas she fled away from the Romanian/soviet dictatorship of Ceaușescu, having the Securitate secret police torture and deport parents and friends.
And though not that far, she's under that "65 y/o". But I won't give up repeating that argument that all that is wrong!
To be fair, in this day and age, projecting a view of yourself as "sharing pics of my cats" is better than projecting nothing, unless you actually are trying to project absolutely nothing. Which is pretty much impossible.
I'm in the "nothing to hide" camp, and I'm not even 25.
Unlike many, I don't see lack of privacy as a compromise, nor do I see it as a security feature (i.e., against terrorism). Unlike many, I do understand the sensitivity of meta data and social graphs, and I deeply care about it.
It is obvious to me that transparency has all the benefits over privacy. It's a simpler way to think about and understand the world, it's easier to implement and maintain, and it's much more efficient.
Transparency is the way it should be. Privacy is just a band-aid, a patch, a set of arbitrary workarounds that in no way fights the underlying problems, if any there are. If anything, privacy only contributes to the increasing reliance on privacy that's expected of us. By keeping information secret, you encourage others to think it should be, and some people eventually are lead to believe that some things should inherently be secretive, without understanding why that is.
Do you really want to live in a world where you must constantly worry about your every steps, your every words, your every interactions? Do you believe it is sustainable to build systems that are 100 times more complex and inefficient as they should be just because you want to remain anonymous? Do you embrace the fact that people who are better manipulators/liers will always have an edge in a society that encourages privacy, since they can control what they decide to show the world? Do you realize that a system that's based on the assumption that secrets are kept secrets is much more fragile than one that's not, as secrets are becoming increasingly more difficult to keep? Do you not realize how much value and opportunities we miss now that people were tricked into believing that privacy is necessary? Bitcoin, Google Glass, geo-tracking anything, health record analysis, etc.
I don't want to hide anymore. I don't want to compete with liers, or be tricked by them. I don't want to password-protect all the things. I don't want to browse behind 7 proxies. I don't want to be explicit about everything that could be implicitly inferred through tracking. I don't want to keep secrets anymore.
Fortunately, I soon won't have to. Transparency will thrive, and privacy will die. My only worry is, how far and deep will people like you go into making society rely on and expect privacy. The deeper you go, the more brutal the transition will be the day the choice is no longer yours.
I'm not entirely averse to the world you describe, and you may be right that it's in our future no matter what we choose today. But...
Citizens of oppressive governments are in very real danger if they have no privacy. When the secret police are listening in to everything you say and ready to whisk you away at whim, there can be no dissent nor hope of reform.
Gay children of highly conservative parents are in very real danger if they have no privacy. Suicide rates in that and similar demographics are disturbingly high, and today many get through simply by hiding their identity until they're out on their own. That's not an option in your world.
Anyone with minority views on contentious issues relative to their neighbors or co-workers is at risk if they have no privacy. Sometimes the most effective solution when you've got to get along with other people is just to stay silent. (I live in a small, rural town, but my values are closer to those of my friends in places like San Francisco. A whole lot of people here would be suspicious or hostile if they knew how much our worldviews differ.)
I could go on. But in general, the people who most need privacy are the ones who are most different from the people around them. It's much easier to set privacy aside when you're surrounded by people who are already happy to accept you for who you are. Maybe there's another stable society to be found with no privacy at all, as you envision, but the road from here to there is steep, and rough, and has dizzying cliffs on either side.
Would you mind terribly posting your current address and social security number by reply to this comment? I'm certain there are many of us who would responsibly use that information to learn more about you, get to know you better, and provide you with a higher quality discourse here on HN as a result of your generous transparency.
> Fortunately, I soon won't have to. Transparency will thrive, and privacy will die.
Privacy doesn't make the world perfect, but neither would transparency.
I hate to accuse anyone of privileged naivety, but if you believe that the elimination of privacy would be a net improvement for the world, then you must also:
- be in a position of social power, and confident in
your ability to remain there, or
- hold no important opinions that diverge from the
orthodoxy or the power structure that upholds it
AND
- have no knowledge of the history of marginalized
groups, the reasons for their marginalization, or
the repercussions thereof, or
- believe we already live in, or are moving inexorably
toward, a eutopian global kumbaya where everyone just
gets along, because enlightenment
I share your dislike for the effort that goes into maintaining privacy. But I know it's important -- vital, even -- because the world is a complicated place. More so for some than others.
Those in positions of social power thrive on secrecy. It's how they are able to maintain that power. So, yes, maybe transparency will alter the lives of those with immense social power (and perhaps in ways those people would not want), but it will likely allow everyone else to benefit from reduced control by elites.
The real lesson from history seems to be that information is power and secret information even more. Elites (what you describe as those with social power) have used their secrets to repress everyone else for millennia (and likely longer than that).
I'm not going to troll about all that, but even though I agree on the general utopia you're describing, let me quote a good friend of mine (who certainly was quoting someone else):
It is important to have the right and possibility to be anonymous
in a world where that right and possibility is not needed. Because
as soon as they are needed, they become vital to be used.
I do want to live in a world where we will have no need for privacy, but I do not want to drop my right for privacy because of how that world works.
This why I call the world you're describing by saying: Transparency will thrive, and privacy will die. My only worry is, how far and deep will people like you go into making society rely on and expect privacy is nothing more than an utopia.
Assuming that transparency will end lies and manipulations is just fanciful.
That said, I don't expect our privacy will last, either. Like you said, efficiency - the current economic fetish - will be used as an excuse to kill it soon enough. For some, that is. Like free markets, transparency will be forced on the poor and avoided by the rich, eliminating most of the potential benefits it could have brought.
Somewhat paradoxically, I don't believe the use of social networks is an indicator that a person doesn't care about privacy. Mostly, they want to communicate with their friends but still keep others out, such as parents and authorities.
I have seen this point being made several times now, that we simply don't deserve privacy or freedom from surveillance because we're using social media. In my opinion, this is wrong. Just because the data is technically available doesn't mean we're implicitly OK with large organizations gathering it all in one place in order to use it against us.
That's not my point at all. Unlike you, I don't presume to predict the behavior of people I don't understand so confidently. I never said that they don't care about privacy. I suspect all humans care. I just expect them to have a different interpretation of it than you do, and I think it's quite arrogant of you to assume that they will naturally agree with you when their backgrounds are so different from yours. Everyone who is convinced in the rightness of their own views believes "time is on my side", but at least one side is always wrong to do so.
It feels really weird to tell you this, but I do believe that was indeed your point. The original statement was
"Those who care about civil rights and an active democracy are young"
to which you replied
"What makes you think the youth will be on your side? This generation is growing up with twitter and facebook as facts of life."
to which I replied
"I don't believe the use of social networks is an indicator that a person doesn't care about privacy."
to which you replied with a stream of insults. I admit I do have trouble seeing where you're coming from. If I misunderstood you in any way, I apologize.
To simplify a bit, I wasn't claiming the next generation would oppose you. I was disputing your claim that they would support you. I think it's far more likely that they will come to some new conclusion that none of us old fogeys will understand, much less accept.
> I wasn't claiming the next generation would oppose you. I was disputing your claim that they would support you.
Oppose or support me in what, exactly? And why is this somehow about me personally? I merely asserted that young people do care about privacy. I'm getting the feeling that you might be conflating what I said with what hengheng wrote.
> I think it's far more likely that they will come to some new conclusion that none of us old fogeys will understand
That's a valid point. However from observation, I would say "people who use $social_network obviously don't care about rights or privacy" is actually the old-fogey position. Teens sending each other stuff on Snapchat, for example, are most likely not OK with their streams being inspected from the outside. In fact, I do believe they even care which one of their friends gets what message.
All the people I have met who resort to the "nothing to hide" paradigm were older than 65.these people don't have Facebook or smartphones, and they don't realize that their cars, insurance records and financial transactions are all being tracked. They do not understand the sensitivity of meta data or social graphs, nor do they care. They have their life in order, and surveillance doesn't take anything away from them. The fear of terrorism is a lot more substantial at their points in life.
I don't know about discourse in France - I can imagine that hell just broke loose after the recent attacks. Here in Germany, it's very much a generation problem. Those who care about civil rights and an active democracy are young, and young educated people are a minority. Old people are heavily catered to by the governing parties, and they all seem to love surveillance, most being lucky enough to never have experienced the downsides.
This fight feels a lot like the gay rights movement. Preconceptions are impossible to overcome, all you can do is wait for twenty years until you have a sizeable part of the population behind you, and then start an uproar. In the meantime, it doesn't help to, say, explain how small the aids propagation rate is. Nobody cares.