I mean that it is worrisome that the public would agree with this, or at least that public sentiment is shifting in that direction enough that this statement doesn't cause visceral outlash against anyone that would say it.

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try_the_bass 8 months ago | parent [-]

Why would it?

As encryption and other privacy technologies become more widespread, so too have those who take advantage of them for the sake of enabling their anti-social behaviors. It also allows people with anti-social behaviors to coordinate in ways that are increasingly hidden from the groups they are working against.

So yeah, people are going to have an increasingly negative response to something they generally used to have neutral-to-positive responses to.

No one should be surprised that this is the case, least of the very people advocating for more (and more widely available) privacy tools! Ubiquitous privacy leads to ubiquitous distrust. After all, how do people know someone is trustworthy? By being able to see their actions, and see how they compare to their stated intentions. A mismatch between stated intentions and actions is evidence that a person is not trustworthy; the more of their actions they can hide from others, the more duplicitous they can be without being discovered.

Put differently, and more personally: In my face-to-face interactions, I may have never met a person before, but I can still "vibe check" them based on the wealth of side channels available to my senses and intuition. It's subject to my own personal biases and things, but I have come to trust my intuitions. Online, I have next to none of those same contextual clues, so my default is to just not trust anyone. If I choose to do something online that requires trust, I appreciate the fact that people have online histories; and if someone has chosen to scrub theirs, this isn't so much of a red flag as it is a reason to not diverge from the status quo. So when I imagine the world that privacy advocates want, where you know nothing about anyone that isn't voluntarily disclosed, I see a vary dark, mistrustful place where effective social cooperation has been utterly neutered. Even when people are willing to share information that "validates" their trustworthiness, the fact that _all_ information about them would be voluntarily disclosed convinces me that it would be so curated as to be useless for the task. This is made even worse if you imagine the deniable authentication folks get their way.

I also personally believe that the effective anonymity of the internet is in large part behind the decay of trust in general, for many of the same reasons. We no longer trust each other because we know so little about each other; and what we do know we trust less and less, because it's becoming increasingly easier to hide or curate that information. Online privacy advocates have already largely gotten their wish: it's not terribly difficult to be anonymous online, and I think our online discourse has been decimated as a result. Obviously not only due to accessible anonymity, but it's certainly a substantial factor.

I'm pretty sure the vast majority of my interactions online these days are with people I've never seen before and will never see again. And the people I do recognize are generally the people I'm least inclined to want to interact with (i.e. basically any Twitter personality). It's all pretty fucked up, if you ask me

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devmor 8 months ago | parent [-]

Your belief that no one has the right to privacy because you feel personally feel uncomfortable interacting with people you don't know is not a very convincing argument for the explicit support of a core tenet of fascism.

I could not begin to fathom what lead you to have this level of trust issue, even with unimportant conversation between complete strangers, but every anecdote you have described is a deeply personal issue of your own, not a justification for any change in society.

	▲	try_the_bass 8 months ago \| parent [-]
		> Your belief that no one has the right to privacy because you feel personally feel uncomfortable interacting with people you don't know is not a very convincing argument for the explicit support of a core tenet of fascism. Wow, way to completely lose the plot. You didn't respond to a single thing I said, and what you're claiming I'm saying wasn't what I said at all. Like, where did I say no one had a right to privacy? I didn't. What I said was if everyone utilized privacy the way you and others in this thread are advocating for, the world would be even more distrustful than it is today, that I think the downsides of increasingly ubiquitous privacy vastly outweigh the upsides. I also think that the majority of the world agrees more with me than you, given the lack of the visceral reaction you seemed to expect from TFA. That lack of reaction would at least indicate they don't agree with you, even if they don't agree with me, either. Like, it's perfectly fine if you want to share nothing with the world rest of the world. I'll just consider you to be a wildly selfish individual (because your position amounts to "fuck you I got mine"), and probably not interact with you unless I can avoid it. But please, consider the consequences of your philosophy, both good and bad! I feel like you're trying to avoid addressing the downsides with this deflection. After all, you'd apparently rather call me a fascist and put words in my mouth than even bring attention to these downsides. You kind of missed the mark with this response entirely. Maybe it's the halo effect (or whatever the inverse is), but when you and others who share your beliefs respond like this, you're really not making me trust you all that much, which means I also will think even less of your beliefs. Maybe reflect on that, too? If you want to advocate for privacy, you'd do a lot more good if you actually came across as an attractive individual. > I could not begin to fathom what lead you to have this level of trust issue, even with unimportant conversation between complete strangers, but every anecdote you have described is a deeply personal issue of your own, not a justification for any change in society. Cool, way to discount my entire lived experience entirely out of hand. You could, you know, try some empathy, and consider that I'm likely just as intelligent and learned as you are (or maybe even more so? Again, with internet anonymity the way it is, who can tell?)