The Not-So-Fine Line Between Privacy and Secrecy

Transparency forces accountability. Secrecy enables an escape from accountability. It really cannot be made any plainer than that.

Much of our fascination with privacy is relatively modern. In a small town, such as where I have lived for most of my life, everybody knows everybody’s business. It is simply a matter of choosing to pay attention or not, as in your restaurant scenario. As the global population becomes increasingly urban, the concept of privacy has grown stronger. Our privacy legislation in Canada ineffectively protects us from things that we don’t need to be protected from and has even less effect on true infringements of privacy.

I agree that a transparent society is the way of the future. While reading an article on the futility of minimum sentences, I came across an interesting statement - the only real deterrent to crime is not the length of the sentence, but the certainly of getting caught. A more transparent society will make getting caught inevitable and thus the crime rate will continue to fall.

Val, the restaurant is a place where we freely choose to go, knowing that others can see what we do and overhear what we say.

If I want to have a _private_ interaction with others, which does not necessarily mean conspiring against the rest of the world, I would not go to a restaurant, but stay at home. Contrary to the restaurant, my home is not a public space, and I would react quite violently if “the state” wanted to treat it as such.

I understand your points. But if one cannot have some privacy sitting on the toilet with the door locked, I am afraid the world is going somewhere bad.

Feels like the following sentence is wrong: “Even though you can do any and all of these things, you make a conscious choice not to, because if you don’t, the negative consequences to yourself outweigh the potential gains.”

Is this an editing error or am I not understanding your point?  Seems like the negative consequences would be greater if one acted upon those impulses..

*Sigh*

Giulio, the point you and Nikki and so many others ALWAYS MISS, (so much so that I have little choice but to conclude it is by deliberate choice) is that with omni-directional surveillance, you have just as much privacy in the bathroom as you do the restaurant. There may be sensors, cameras, etc, BUT IF YOU KNOW THEY ARE THERE, AND ARE AWARE IF ANYONE IS USING THEM WITHOUT YOUR PERMISSION, how is it really any different? If the moment someone “peeks” in on you, YOU KNOW WHO IT IS, and whether or not they have your permission to do so?

The assumption you ALWAYS make is that your “privacy” will be violatable WITHOUT YOUR KNOWLEDGE. And in a society in which SECRECY IS STILL POSSIBLE, this is possible. IN a society in which SECRECY IS NOT POSSIBLE, your privacy is much more inviolate than it is now.

Win C

Umm, you must not be parsing the sentence correctly, as I am saying that you DO NOT act on these impulses because the negative consequences outweigh the gains and you therefore consciously choose not to act.

Val,
I’m wondering how all this meshes with the “attention economy”. Put simply, this the idea that nowadays information is no longer a scarce (and therefore tradable) commodity, but attention is. There are lots of problems with this view (obviously certain types of information ARE still scarce, and therefore tradable, but there seems to be an important issue here somewhere.

The bottom line is that we can only be aware of things if we are paying attention, at least at some level. Everything may be “known” in your fully transparent world, but not everything can be known by everyone. Example: I might pay someone to trawl the Internet for public knowledge on a specific topic and summarise it in a way that is relevant for me. My guess is that people who want to hide things (for good, bad or neutral reasons) will be able to do so by hiding them in plain sight. And, of course, as long as there are élites with more resources (including the attention of others) at their disposal, the better they will be able to do this.

@Peter

You are making the assumption here that human “attention” will always remain limited, and that our abilities to parse knowledge will stay the same as they are now. I don’t make that presupposition. With the advances in making “intelligent agents” able to be trained to search out knowledge of interest to us, such as Smart’s “Digital Twin” the ability individuals will have to search out and track down knowledge of any nature will increase over time as well.

And yes, while individuals might not be “paying attention” I do expect who knows how many tailored “AIs” being set to actively hunt for violations of whatever “privacy” laws we enact, and with greater accountability on the part of individuals, many many fewer laws being needed to be enforced in order to prevent harm from being caused to each other and society. While “high status” actors might be able to “hide in plain sight” for a limited period of time, I cannot see that ability being long lived.

And again, I will stress that this is NOT ADVOCACY, merely reporting on the logical end results of current trends.

Thanks Val…this makes sense, I guess, although I would add that there is also a link with discussions we have been having about the nature of identity and how this might evolve in this new, enhanced, hyperconnected world. Will “individuals” still essentially be minds emerging in individual brains residing in individual human (or post-human) bodies, or will connections between biological brains, and between them and (other) hardware devices, reach a stage where “individual” persons, to the extent that they can be said to exist at all, are rather distributed “minds” that are clearly identifiable but are distributed across several devices. As much data is already today? Are companies a precursor to this development, and if so could this be taken as a justification for the US Supreme Court’s (much maligned in progressive circles) decision to accord freedom-of-speech rights to companies?

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