I’d rather keep the future probability for total Orwellian surveillance low, thanks.
Sadly, that horse has long left the barn—and in any case, it seems to me that privacy is even in principle incompatible with highly developed digital technology.
What I find to be a much more realistic danger than the prospect of Orwellian government are the social and market implications of a low-privacy world. If a lot of information about your life is easily accessible online, this means that embarrassing mistakes that would cause only mild consequences in the past can now render you permanently unemployable, and perhaps even socially ostracized. In such a world, once you do anything disreputable, it’s bound to haunt you forever, throwing itself into the face of anyone who just types your name into a computer (and not to even mention the future technologies for other sorts of pattern-matching and cross-referencing search).
To make things even worse, in a society where you’re expected to place a detailed log of your private life online by social convention—and it seems like we are going towards this, if the “social networking” websites are any indication—refusal to do so will send off a thunderous signal of weirdness and suspiciousness. Thus, the combination of technology and social trends can result in a suffocatingly controlling society even with the most libertarian government imaginable.
DSimon:
Sadly, that horse has long left the barn—and in any case, it seems to me that privacy is even in principle incompatible with highly developed digital technology.
What I find to be a much more realistic danger than the prospect of Orwellian government are the social and market implications of a low-privacy world. If a lot of information about your life is easily accessible online, this means that embarrassing mistakes that would cause only mild consequences in the past can now render you permanently unemployable, and perhaps even socially ostracized. In such a world, once you do anything disreputable, it’s bound to haunt you forever, throwing itself into the face of anyone who just types your name into a computer (and not to even mention the future technologies for other sorts of pattern-matching and cross-referencing search).
To make things even worse, in a society where you’re expected to place a detailed log of your private life online by social convention—and it seems like we are going towards this, if the “social networking” websites are any indication—refusal to do so will send off a thunderous signal of weirdness and suspiciousness. Thus, the combination of technology and social trends can result in a suffocatingly controlling society even with the most libertarian government imaginable.