I was using it in the loose sense of “how much effort should I put into making it difficult to ascertain my real life identity.”
That is a very useful taxonomy, I may reference it in another project I’m working on analysing why people value privacy (and whether they should). The main motivation seems to be the ‘icky’ feeling people get at the thought of being observed, not any expected harms. Which means they are unwilling to accept small violations of privacy that would have massive social benefits (e.g. supplying police with all citizens fingerprints and DNA would massively reduce the number of unsolved crimes, with very minimal possibility for abuse).
supplying police with all citizens fingerprints and DNA would massively reduce the number of unsolved crimes
This might be overselling it. Only about a quarter of criminal offences are recorded by the police, and they already solve some crimes despite incomplete fingerprint & DNA databases. So even if expanding the databases meant the police solved every crime they recorded, the number of unsolved crimes would fall by at most 20% (unless there were a reason to expect reporting/recording of crimes to rise as well).
I was using it in the loose sense of “how much effort should I put into making it difficult to ascertain my real life identity.”
That is a very useful taxonomy, I may reference it in another project I’m working on analysing why people value privacy (and whether they should). The main motivation seems to be the ‘icky’ feeling people get at the thought of being observed, not any expected harms. Which means they are unwilling to accept small violations of privacy that would have massive social benefits (e.g. supplying police with all citizens fingerprints and DNA would massively reduce the number of unsolved crimes, with very minimal possibility for abuse).
This might be overselling it. Only about a quarter of criminal offences are recorded by the police, and they already solve some crimes despite incomplete fingerprint & DNA databases. So even if expanding the databases meant the police solved every crime they recorded, the number of unsolved crimes would fall by at most 20% (unless there were a reason to expect reporting/recording of crimes to rise as well).