Philosophy Discussion: Privacy vs. Openness

[luckybit]

My post was a bit long but the point, I don't think human beings currently are psychologically, culturally, or socially prepared for total transparency. It would be like giving nuclear weapons to a toddler and then expecting something good to happen. You either have to somehow make the toddler think as an adult, or you have to augment the thinking of the toddler with algorithms, using machine intelligence.

I don't think we have enough time to somehow make the toddler into an adult. So if we are going to give the toddler the God's eye view, we probably should augment the toddler by giving the toddler decision support, so that every human being can overcome bias, make rational decisions, follow science, factor in the results of the latest studies and experiments, etc.

But I do not think the current humans who make decisions on how it feels, or based on a holy book, or based on "gut", or anything similar to that, should be judging other humans based on this. Unfortunately  the vast majority of humans aren't enlightened, aren't aware of their own ignorance, aren't educated (and the United States in particular doesn't even value education or critical thinking), and you end up with a society of people who are proudly ignorant, who are asking for more transparency, so they can apply religious morality or other biases on everyone.

Consider that the majority of people are of certain major religions. Consider that a lot of people do not make decisions based on the perceived consequences, but based on whether or not their religion, or a book from thousands of years ago, says it's good or bad. Consider most people don't keep track of the latest results in neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, or anything else, and consider that the United States has more prisoners per capita than any other country?

Do you feel confident that the average United States citizen could handle the amount of information which will be made available without using it for political or social or psychological persecution? If we had an enlightened citizen maybe I could have more faith, but currently we do not and you can just look around and see that. There also is not a trend toward enlightenment or education.

[luckybit]

I heard what Bytemaster had to say and honestly I've spent years thinking about the same issue. There is a book called the transparent society and even a video on total transparency (futurist perspective).

Secrecy is NOT privacy

First, secrecy is NOT privacy. Privacy is access control while secrecy could mean no one other than yourself can access it. Private information could be what you don't want your wife or parents to know, while secrecy is something only you know. Your inner most thoughts are usually considered secret, while private could be your social security number. Most people don't have much of an ability to keep secrets, and privacy could be your Google search history for the last 10 year,s but you might not be responsible for keeping it private because Google is.

Who opens up first?

The issue isn't so much that humans beings are bad at keeping secrets (even though we are), and the issue isn't a matter of privacy vs security either because in many cases privacy enables security. The question ultimately evolves into who opens up first?

Everyone is going to look pretty bad when every moment of their life is logged and people who hate them are able to pull out of context every ignorant thing they said, every questionable thing they did,  etc. The problem with our society and our people which prevents us from having an easy time going into a transparent society is what I call "judgement culture". Human beings like to judge each other on every aspect of life, all the time, with wildly divergent moral or social norms, some of which aren't based on anything other than fear, or some other emotion.

Who opens up first?

Again who opens up first? People in authority in my opinion have a reason to be transparent, but for people who don't have any authority over anyone, who aren't in any sort of position of trust, it's not the same. When you give everyone access to everyone's information then you're expecting or requiring everyone become responsible with information and as we know the majority of humans aren't. A lot of humans abuse information which does not belong to them, using it as a weapon, and the term "information warfare" evolves from that.

How do we make the transition without violence?

So the problem is ultimately the transition. There is no easy transition to a transparent society. The other problem is how transparent do you want to go? For some people they would agree to a society where everyone can read each other's thoughts and scan the inside of each other's bodies. If society is totally transparent then eventually your thoughts will not be private, and that is the logical outcome of the transparent society that isn't promoted in books. Once privacy is lost you can't get it back, it's just gone, and many people alive today would rather die than give up their ability to have private thoughts and feelings.

Humans are currently too ignorant, irrational, and psychologically confused to handle transparency

I'm not a person who believes that the current group of people are rational enough, or psychologically capable, of handling a transparent society. It's sort of like the power the church had back in the day, giving that power back to the general public again, but the problem here is people will likely seek to police each other's thoughts and actions, until no individuality is left. We see it now with "political correctness", "censorship", and etiquette, and we will see even more of it if we immediately transition to total transparency. The witch hunts will become the main focus of society because people tend to do that when they know too much too soon.

The small town analogy doesn't work because what people who use that analogy aren't realizing is that the mind is the only real border in the digital world. In a small town where everyone is made to live the same, the small town becomes the mind, the hive mind will ultimately be what society becomes. I don't think most people who push for the transparent society understand that the outcome will be a  bunch of hive minds, not unlikely the borg, or the ultimate communes, arranged by algorithm.

At the same time I've also come to recognize that these are trends and the total transparency trend is winning out over the privacy trend. It is likely that in 2025 or sooner, we will have a total surveillance society as in the Youtube video, and when you also add in sousveillence, AI and BCI (brain to computer interface), eventually not even thoughts will be private unless humans reverse the trend.

My own current solution to the problem is, in my opinion we are not going to be human anymore once this is over. We should embrace transhumanism, and do everything we can to brace for impact of technology, we should redefine "human" as we learn more about ourselves, and we should seek to swap "human judges" with either cyborgs or AI. Cyborg judges would be humans augmented with abilities to make wise, sapient decisions, with enhanced rationality and objectivity. This trend is already in motion, as doctors already use machine intelligence to help diagnose people, but as humans become more transparent I do not think the human brain will be capable of handling all that information and either algorithms will have to assist humans to make decisions, or we will have situations where groups like ISIS or religious morality inform human judgement, which should scare anyone who is seeing a trend toward transparency.

Total surveillance society video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjwzhPkzfp0
The Transparent Society: Secrecy vs. Privacy, Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0AX79lT4_c
The Transparent Society: Secrecy vs. Privacy, Part 2: https://youtu.be/8oz2CZgrm8k
Moral panic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic

[Empirical1.2]

I've had similar related thoughts on commerce & voting.  It would be great to continue the discussion here...

You definitely don't want to be able to prove 'who' you voted for in the overwhelming majority of countries & situations imo. (Which I think was the original premise of FMV which I didn't like.) 

However if there was some blockchain based algorithm where if you voted for 'Bob' privately,  the vote was mathematically certain to be given to 'Bob' without you/someone being able to tell that you specifically voted for 'Bob' after that would be useful.

[merivercap]

For those that listened to the mumble today, Bytemaster spoke about the idea of privacy and how it might be better if more things were public instead of private to even the playing field with those in government and those in power who already have access to private information.  I thought it was a fascinating discussion and I've had similar related thoughts on commerce & voting.  It would be great to continue the discussion here...