OK, poor choice on my part. Let's say that your correspondence with the neighbour's wife, or for that matter your love E-mails to $CONSENTING_ADULT_OF_SAME_SEX got aired. Point is, there's all sorts of communication we desire to keep private - some of it because parts of society frowns upon its contents (infidelity, above), some because it is illegal or otherwise puts you at risk (same sex relations), or some just because you would feel embarrassed if it was made public, and it's nobody else's damn business anyway.

As for the watchlist part, yes, it is hyperbole - but the assumption that your contact would be readily dismissed as random relies on the authorities collecting said information being competent. I think it is naïve to assume that such info will never be misinterpreted and that it will never be retained just in case it proves useful later on. The 'they' I referred to were the authorities collecting and analysing the information, by the way.

And yes, I fault the powers that be for assuming criminal intent in all of the citizenry.

> OK, poor choice on my part. Let's say that your correspondence with the neighbour's wife, or for that matter your love E-mails to $CONSENTING_ADULT_OF_SAME_SEX got aired. Point is, there's all sorts of communication we desire to keep private - some of it because parts of society frowns upon its contents (infidelity, above), some because it is illegal or otherwise puts you at risk (same sex relations), or some just because you would feel embarrassed if it was made public, and it's nobody else's damn business anyway.

I may be biased in the particulars, but I think it's good that society frowns upon certain behaviors. So if you're cheating on your spouse, I would rather they find out than be kept in the dark. If you're secretly embezzling money from the city government, I think the public has a right to find out about that sort of thing. Better still if there's enough transparency that you can't get away with it in the first place. You say "it's nobody else's damn business anyway", but in the example of infidelity, it isn't exactly a victimless thing. If everyone's informed and consenting, it's not really "infidelity" anymore, and not really a problem if you want to keep your swinging a secret from your family.

Your examples so far have mostly been cases where the behavior is inappropriate in some way:

- Infidelity: the ignorant spouse is a victim, so this isn't a victimless behavior

- Flirting with the intern at work: probably against the workplace policies you and they agreed to when you took the job.

- Giving money to an Islamic militant: If you were actually ignorant, this is generally appropriate behavior and anyone who looks at your history will probably agree. However, if you knew they were a militant and gave them money anyway, this is probably not appropriate behavior and your history would show that

I guess it's not very convincing to argue that people doing inappropriate things should be allowed to get away with it? It seems like in each of these contexts, privacy is only in service of hiding bad behavior? It's somewhat worrisome that these kinds of examples are also the examples most predominantly offered by privacy advocates. You're not the only one who gives examples like these, and the shared themes have concerning implications. Examples like these definitely do not work in favor of arguing for more privacy, because people will pick up on this throughline and start to associate "people hiding things they shouldn't be doing" with "privacy advocacy".

The only example you've given so far that seems convincing is the "love emails to consenting adult of same sex", which case I'd argue that it being embarrassing is probably more a problem of assholes in society than anything else. Someone giving you shit for that (and anyone who cares to listen to their shit-slinging) is probably saying more about their own antisocial tendencies than anything else. This is also a victimless thing, so I'm more amenable to just agreeing that folks should have privacy in this case... they're not doing anything wrong, after all.

However, the other solution to that particular issue is to make society more tolerant of people with differing harmless beliefs. I'm generally in favor of solutions that improve society overall and seem to have fewer downsides, rather than the solutions that prioritize empowering individuals in antisocial ways. To use an extreme example to illustrate the point: I don't think anyone is in favor of allowing folks to freely kill each other. Having the freedom to take someone else's life is in some ways the ultimate expression of an individual's freedom, but I think almost everyone would agree that the downsides heavily outweigh the upsides of that particular freedom.