This basically illustrates one of the biggest issues with the privacy debate. Generally, "enforced transparency" advocates (who are against things like pseudonyms, like that Google CEO) are often privileged people who have little to lose through not being private, and cannot understand or appreciate the need for privacy by people, for instance, activists who's identity who is kept private to shield them from personal attack, people with a sexuality that isn't accepted by people they know - transparency advocates forget that we don't live in a perfect world and that everyone has the right to shield themselves from irrational people who would destroy them on finding out certain things about them.
I speculate that, in a world of total transparency, things like this will become much less important as everyone realizes how weird nearly everyone is. I think that, to an extent, everybody thinks that the general population is much cleaner and more "normal" than they really are, and that in an environment where everybody can know everything about everybody, revelations like this will cease to be interesting.
However, I certainly could be wrong, and I'm certainly not advocating for anything in particular here.
Your relative normalcy gives you the privilege of thinking how weird "nearly everyone is", and that having no privacy wouldn't be such a big deal.
There are many groups of people who still experience tremendous bigotry...for example, having everyone be completely transparent doesn't make transgender folks any less rare, or any less subject to prejudice and hostility. On the whole, having everyone "come out" about whatever it is that takes them outside of "normalcy" might be good for society. But, for an individual who isn't ready to be out, or who has safety concerns about being out, the total transparency argument is pretty hollow.
I know you're not campaigning for anything here, so I'm not really arguing with you. But, I am highly mistrustful of Facebook, and consider some of their tactics and goals deeply unethical, so I wanted to point out that what many are viewing as a neutral "technology marches ever onward" sort of thing is really more a situation of a few companies extracting value from exposing people's private lives, and constantly being on the look out for more ways to extract that value and more ways to profit from that erosion of privacy. It isn't neutral and it isn't accidental. Facebook (and Google to a lesser degree) wants to own your private life and sell it to the highest bidder.
"I speculate that, in a world of total transparency, things like this will become much less important as everyone realizes how weird nearly everyone is."
Seems like very wishful thinking. It seems to be hard-wired into human nature to be suspicious of, and consequently antagonistic toward, noticeable differences. Forcing those differences out into the open probably won't significantly alter the impulse toward hostility. It seems just as likely that the differences will come out into the daylight, but the prejudices will sneak into hiding. I'm not sure if those prejudices are more dangerous when they're naked, or when they're cloaked.
I think you raise an interesting point, of course. I guess I just have a more cynical and pessimistic view of the result.
I can't imagine a world where I'd be comfortable with publicly displaying the entirety of my Google search history.
I guess this is complicated by the fact that our actions don't necessarily reflect our beliefs or identity, and a public display of actions or even just words (posts) can present a misconstrued image of ourselves to the world (or at least one that is ripe for misinterpretation).
You are totally ignore physical and psychological violence that people throw out towards others for very baseless and primal reasons, often for just acting differently, disrupting a social pattern, making another feel less secure in there world view.
People are often hiding aspects of there life not for embarrassment, but for protection. Then there is always the entire "blame the X" that precedes many great atrocities.
You may like to think the world is a utopia or not far off it but genocides are going on right this minute, its the last thing the world needs is more exposure to vulnerable people.
Quite the opposite. By summing up people with different traits together, what you get is a normal distribution around the "completely average person" (central limit maybe?), and that's what people compare everyone with. As others stated, that's what happens in small towns where everyone knows everyone. You lose the sweet anonymity of the city.
> I speculate that, in a world of total transparency, things like this will become much less important as everyone realizes how weird nearly everyone is.
We've done this before and it doesn't work that way.
Back in Colonial New England, say Massachusetts in the latter 1600s, nearly everyone in a given small town would be essentially 'transparent' to pretty much everyone else. There was so little room, and so few people, that there wasn't space to have much privacy.
And social norms were horrible. You couldn't get away with being of the wrong religion, with being suspected of adultery, or a lot of things that are either ignored or not considered problems now.
People didn't learn to accept others. They forced others to conform. And the revelations never stopped being interesting to those who enforced conformity.
Yes, you could indeed leave the only world you've ever known, destroying your ties to everyone you've ever loved and respected. You could also kill yourself.
The lack of compassion here is stunning. Regardless of what you think of suicide, the fact that suicide rates are currently astronomical among LGBT youth in America should give you pause.
The solution is to this is to build, as I was asked to design once in a job interview at a major tech company(!) a communal dossier that collects sighting reports and tracks the movements and details of these people, and see how they react to a site like whereiseric.com that shares his life details with us as much as Google snarfs our details.
