on 2012-09-03 17:02 Larry Colen wrote
It's my feeling that privacy is, for the most part, an anomalous concept in human society nearly unique to our time and culture. For most of human history, most people lived in small villages, or nomadic tribes, generally sharing one room houses (or tents) with their whole family. Basically, if you did something, pretty much everyone in your world knew about it. Yes, it's possible to sneak around, for a little bit.
it's an interesting thought experiment, but first of all in the US since 1967 there has been formalized a reasonable expectation of privacy, and it stems from the Constitution, so i would say it predates "our time"
i do get your point, but do you really know what people experienced in the "tribal" societies you imagine? first of all, was there as much information gathering and storage potential? second was it good? … was their level of repression, unfairness, mental anguish, etc. perhaps higher than ours?
and third, were there social constructs, tools or people as well-trained that could so powerfully as today exploit knowledge about others for greed, fear, or power?
Let's say that google knows that you've been doing searches on third party batteries for the K-5, and for some reason, that information becomes public. How is that going to hurt you?
again, the fallacy that anyone should have access to all your information unless you can show how it might harm you
We are definitely going through a transitional period. It's going to be very interesting to see how culture changes when the people who grew up with broadband internet access are old enough to be the ones in positions of power. People who had daily conversations with friends all over the world, long before they were forty years old. People that by the time they were forty, already had twenty five years of pictures of things that seemed like a good idea at the time (out with friends and possibly after several drinks) posted on the web.
my Internet (well, Usenet) postings from 1979 or 1980 are still archived; i'm not terribly ashamed of them, but i'm not going to point them out for you
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