Imagine someone comes to you and says: "You must remove your door locks. Anyone can come into your house any time. You also need cameras across most of your house. But in exchange, magic elves will do all of your home chores: washing, dishes, folding laundry, cleaning, minor home repairs. All of this will be done for pennies on the dollar compared to any current option."

How many people would take it?

I know I'd actually be tempted. Con: total loss of privacy. Pro: it folds laundry, and I f'ing loathe laundry with the intensity of a billion suns.

Every business has similar trade-offs they'd be tempted to take.

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rightbyte an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Sounds like a children story about not making a deal with the Devil?

The implied part the children already know from other stories is:

The magic elves have a recorded history of laughing at their customers when they are on the toilette, hitting on their husbands/wifes and misleading their children into worshipping the elvendom and wander off into the forest.

The story ends in some sort of catharsis for the protagonist when the elves go one step too far. In the happy ending variant Disney makes a version off it is not too late.

	▲	api 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I don't disagree, but history shows that people (and businesses!) can and will make such trades. Look at the privacy nightmare, and it's not just individuals. Large companies put all their Crown Jewels into things like Google Drive, gmail, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. Even governments do this. The only payoff is convenience. That's how little people and even businesses value their privacy.

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em-bee an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

i believe that in the future technology will be so advanced that protection of privacy is impossible. the only way to counter that is education to respect peoples privacy and very harsh punishments for violations.

i also believe that we will live in a post scarcity world, which means profit is no longer interesting, so any business case for invading your privacy will go away and therefore it will only happen for personal interest.

the key in any case will be education, because without it abuse will be rampant and progress will halt because everyone is going to be suspicious of everyone else.

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toofy an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> i believe that in the future technology will be so advanced that protection of privacy is impossible. the only way to counter that is…

i’m not sure why so many of us have fallen into this… “there is no other future” thing…

there are other options. plenty of them. there is no singular solution. we could always just say “no”. and that’s that. that would be one option.

why do we feel like there is no other way? why are we afraid to say “nah”?

	▲	Calazon 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I suspect because some of these things would require us all to say no, which is difficult to coordinate and enforce. It's not impossible, but it's not as easy as "just" saying no, as a society.

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api 21 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I'd say I generally agree that the privacy problem has no techno-fix and must be solved by regulation.

For example, we could extend HIPAA-style fines for leaked personal data to other forms of intimate data like location, biometrics, local documents, private chats, etc.

Leak someone's location history? That'll be one $$$ fine per incident where an incident is one person data point.

This at the very least converts this kind of data from an asset into a potential liability, incentivizing companies to not collect it, not hold it long, or thoroughly anonymize and aggregate it and then discard specifics.