Why is privacy important? Be specific.
That’s how I prompt AI, not how I would address [a community of] people. But that’s just me, I guess.
Do you really need to ask this question with LLMs around? We had big data for several decades and when it emerged, nobody had a fuck about privacy cause of “who would even want to look at me specifically?”.
Now we get to the point where everyone can be analysed via AI. All the types of questions could be answered almost automatically:
- What do I need to day to this group of people to be elected?
- List all vulnerabilities of person X.
- List all the people that look like they have money and not enough connections to protect themselves.
Etc etc.
Gifting your data to tech fash corpos is a form of suicide.
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None of your goddamn business.
That’s none of your god damn business, and I’d thank you to stay the hell out of my affairs.
Because the more a stranger knows about you the more tempted they are to use that information against you - even if their intentions are pure at first.
Because there are people out there that are intent on using certain information to harm you in one way or another.
What’s your credit card number? I am curious.
Do you have children? What are their names and where do they go to school when you are not watching over them? again I am curious.
What do you care for deeply and value most? Is it your family, a friend? Who are they and what would you do to avoid them from any pain, again I am curious.
What is your daily routine? When can I expect to see you in a specific location and when will you be away from your possessions in your home? What kind of security do you have on your physical space and digital space? I am curious.
What kinds of things do you like and not like? What would you do if I could provide you the things that you favour? Or what of if I subtly introduced those things that you dislike purposefully? I am curious.
What do you get paid at your work? What if I was negotiating my salary and seeking a promotion above you, what if I made more than you and did less?
What do you make of generative AI? And what if I had your likeness passed on to a model to mimic your look, your sound, your appearance and mannerisms and opinions? What if I made you say or do or support something that you don’t stand for? What then?
What if you made a living off something and you only received payment once you had presented this thing to the client or intended audience, what if you showed me what this was before you did this and got paid? Would that bother you? Would that affect your income at all?
The human condition is not one of a utopia, mind your own business as best you can but don’t expect that everyone has been given an equal footing in this world. For your sake and the sake of others, privacy is a matter of respect at a micro, macro and global scale and beyond that it has implications to intellectual property, the ability for a single person or a nation to maintain resources and income, and allow at the most basic level a person to have a conversation with themselves or with god and be truely vulnerable without any judgement whatsoever.
Privacy is a fundamental right that protects autonomy, personal dignity, and the freedom to engage with society without fear of judgment or control. It acts as a crucial safeguard against authoritarianism. Without it, every choice we make can be monitored, recorded, and scrutinized by those in power. History shows that surveillance is often used not to protect people, but to label harmless behaviors as suspicious or deviant, creating pretexts for further erosion of rights.
But beyond its role in protecting civil liberties, privacy is essential for personal growth and mental well-being. We all need space to be ourselves, to practice new skills without perfection, explore interests that might seem uncool or immature, enjoy “guilty pleasure” media, or simply act silly, without worrying about how it will be perceived or used against us. These moments aren’t trivial. They’re where creativity, healing, and self-discovery happen. Privacy gives us room to evolve, to make mistakes, and to be human
This! 1000x this! I’ve spent years educating myself on tech, privacy, psychology etc trying to answer this question. The root thoughts are berried so deep it’s hard to find the signal in the noise. I’ve seen more concise explanations similar to yours in the past year than I have in the previous decade. I think the collective consciousness may finally be getting to a place where they’re starting to ask the right questions, and thankfully concise answer like this are imo the right directions to point people.
Ok. A counterargument.
Information wants to be free. And to let it flow freely is the least-effort solution.
By letting information flow freely we approach a state where everybody knows everything about everything and everybody. This could be pretty great and seems the easy and natural way to go. A kind of superdemocracy. By inhibiting this evolution we create a state of deformity and disease.
Information doesn’t “want” anything, you’re personifying a concept.
It’s a figure of speech.
It means that information propagates extremely easily.
It means that information propagates extremely easily.
Sounds like you’ve just answered your question about why privacy is important.
I appreciate the sentiment that “information wants to be free,” and there’s real value in open access to knowledge. But I’m not sure that vision logically extends to all information, including the deeply personal, being universally accessible.
People aren’t just data packets. We’re complex, evolving individuals. The idea that we could, or should, live in a world where “everyone knows everything about everyone” assumes both a superhuman capacity for processing information and a uniform comfort with exposure, which simply doesn’t reflect human reality. If we’re imagining a sci-fi ideal like the Borg collective, where minds are fused into a single hive consciousness, then sure, total information flow makes sense. But that comes at the cost of individuality, autonomy, and the very idea of personal choice. And that’s not a future I’m eager to embrace.
Anyway, here’s my key point. Protecting personal privacy doesn’t hinder the free flow of information, it enables it. The right to privacy safeguards your ability to seek information freely, without surveillance or judgment. It’s what allows you to use encryption, a VPN, or a private browser to explore ideas, access censored content, or speak anonymously. Without privacy, the powerful can track, pressure, or punish dissent, chilling free expression rather than encouraging it.
So I agree, knowledge should be free. But personal lives shouldn’t be public records. Privacy isn’t the enemy of openness, it’s one of its strongest defenders
But I’m not sure that vision logically extends to all information…
I see it more as a physical fact. Keeping a secret takes more effort than open communication. Information propagates like a fart.
assumes both a superhuman capacity for processing information
Well that would be google. You don’t need to carry the information around with you, you just need to know how to craft the right query.
and a uniform comfort with exposure,
It might just be the taboo of the hour too.
But that comes at the cost of individuality, autonomy, and the very idea of personal…
That’s a stretch
Anyway, here’s my key point. Protecting personal privacy doesn’t hinder the free flow of information, it enables it.
That’s a big stretch. Literally “inhibiting the flow increases the flow”. I mean I see your argument. But the constraining force here isn’t free information, it’s judgement and persecution.
So I agree, knowledge should be free.
Mine wasn’t an argument of moral imperative but physics. And fighting physics is exhausting.
Information propagates like a fart.
Only sometimes. Just as easily, it vanishes, forgotten, deleted, ignored. Silence is also low-effort. And just because something spreads easily doesn’t make it valuable. Fire spreads fast too, but we still build firewalls.
Well that would be Google…
Fair point, I misunderstood the scope of your earlier statement. But equal access doesn’t mean equal power. Not everyone has the time, tools, or safety to use that access. Surveillance doesn’t democratize information; it concentrates control.
If your “superdemocracy” is just putting everyone’s secrets on Google, then it sounds a lot like our world today, except with fewer boundaries and more vulnerability. You get to know what I had for dinner; the government gets to know who disagrees with it. I’m not seeing the upgrade.
And do you have a practical replacement for what privacy protects? Because honestly, your “counterargument” rests on shaky ground.
Historically, removing the right to privacy hasn’t led to openness, instead it’s paved the way for authoritarian control, censorship, and the suppression of dissent. So why should we believe this time it’ll somehow result in a “super cool superdemocracy”?
And more to the point: how exactly does not recording every action I take in my own home and uploading it to Google cause a “state of deformity and disease”? That… doesn’t make sense. It sounds less like “the physics of information” and more like a thought experiment untethered from human reality.
It might just be the taboo of the hour.
Possibly. But privacy, having a space for solitude, reflection, and error, has been valued in every society I’m aware of. Be it in homes, letters, diaries, or faith. Given it’s ubiquity, I don’t think it’s fashion. Rather, it seems to be human nature. Mental health, identity, creativity, for many these depend on room to grow unseen.
That’s a stretch.
In light of your clarification, yes, partly. But if we’re talking total openness as ideal, then autonomy is the casualty. That part isn’t hyperbole.
The constraining force isn’t free information, it’s judgment and persecution.
Exactly. And privacy is the defense against that judgment. It doesn’t inhibit free flow, it enables it. People stop asking questions when they’re watched. Whistleblowers stay silent. Artists self-censor. Privacy protects the conditions for free thought and expression.
You seem to want to examine privacy removed from its context, as if it were just a technical bottleneck. But its value emerges from the world we live in, a world with power imbalances, stigma, and consequences. Stripping away privacy lets these issues stifle the flow of information far more than privacy itself does. And speaking of removing something from the context that informs it’s value, what good is open information in a society where no one dares to think aloud?
Mine wasn’t a moral argument but physics. Fighting physics is exhausting.
Then let’s talk physics: entropy destroys data too. Hard drives fail. Links rot. Memories fade. Information doesn’t inevitably spread, it’s fragile. And the energy we but into propagating information is massive. But even if information did inherently spread by it’s very nature, “it’s tiring to resist” isn’t a justification to abandon the utilities of privacy.
And regardless I’d argue the opposite is far more exhausting: living where every search, stumble, or private moment is permanent, public, and open to weaponization. That’s not liberation. It’s a panopticon with better bandwidth.
Information doesn’t “want to be free” the companies that want my personal habits and interests have invested a whole lot of effort in acquiring it.
Because knowledge is power and most people don’t like giving whomever power over them for no reason. Also, it shouldn’t matter why privacy is important to people, the fact that it is should suffice to protect it.
It’s important because we say it’s important?
Hmm. That seems a little sketchy. Reality becomes whatever’s popular. Propaganda becomes the ruling force. Etc.
Actually, yes! What is “important” in a general sense is a similar question to that of the meaning of life. In the end there is no external, absolute rule of nature that decides this for us but we must create our own values. And privacy is such a value. In part you can derive it from others like personal freedom but that only moves the question. Different opinions on what our values should be and how to resolve conflicting ones in specific situations is the subject of ethics and has been debated since humans could debate.
Because I don’t trust you and shouldn’t have to.
Privacy affects a number of things, so it’s hard to give any broad answer, but here’s a few individual examples I guess.
- You close the door when you use the bathroom. We are simply uncomfortable with being perceived in a vulnerable situation like that by other people in most circumstances. To get rid of privacy would be to get rid of your bathroom door, and make yourself uncomfortable when you simply don’t have to be.
- You store your passwords and don’t share them with anyone. To give up privacy would be to give up all the access to your private accounts.
- You might not state exactly how much money you have when you’re in public. Without privacy, people with a lot to lose would suddenly be easily identifiable targets for bad actors that could kidnap them, extort them for ransom, etc.
- Online search habits can identify things about you. A lack of privacy means targeted advertisements can convince you to buy things you wouldn’t waste your money on otherwise, (cough cough instagram showing teen girls beauty ads specifically when it detected they were feeling insecure), or that governments and corporations can influence your decisions and opinions away from your best interests (cough cough Cambridge Analytica scandal)
- Being open isn’t always beneficial. You might lie to a child about where puppies go when they die, because making that currently private information public to the child would only make the situation harder for them.
- Harassment relies on identifiable information about you. If you had to publish your name, address, phone number, and email with every account you made because privacy didn’t exist, any statement someone dislikes could lead to major problems for you. This means self-censorship, and constantly living in fear if your ideas exist outside someone else’s acceptable worldview who happens to also be willing to cause you harm.
Obviously these are just a few examples, and there are ways in which a lack of privacy can also be beneficial. For example on my harassment point, you could also argue it’s bad that neo-nazis have anonymity, because it makes it hard to stop their dangerous rhetoric, but that could again be countered by saying neo-nazis are much more likely to harass and threaten people, who themselves then need privacy.
It’s a similar argument to free speech. It might not be good for everyone in all cases, but limiting free speech (or in this case, not having or limiting privacy) would lead to oppressive ideologies gaining power faster than non-oppressive ones, would dull human expression and make things more monolithic, and generally make any form of democratic or outside-the-norm expression extremely difficult if not impossible, so we accept the potential downsides in favor of the much larger upsides.
Because it’s not the first 99 people that know all about you that are the problem, it’s the 1 in a 100 who are out to grief or scam or steal or coerce.
People love to share about themselves, and that’s fine… unless there’s a malicious actor prompting them to overshare.
People love to gossip about each other, and that’s usually tolerable… until rumor is weaponized.
Privacy rights can be likened to a strong door keeping the wolves out.
Another option would be to do away with the wolves.
Which is cheaper for our society?
How would you do away with the wolves today, if the non-wolves could become wolves tomorrow?
I don’t see that as a possible option at all.
I don’t know.
The design of the door is a well-researched topic. The elimination of wolves, less so.
One approach would be to feed the wolves. A well fed wolf has little interest in breaking your door.
One approach to keeping the wolves fed might be UBI.
An old approach is religious indoctrination.
is a well-researched topic. The elimination of wolves, less so.
There’s plenty of research on wolves, their disappearance/eradication, and (incentivised, supported) reintroduction to Europe.
A well fed wolf has little interest in breaking your door.
I find this symbolism stupid. Wolves aren’t exactly well known to attack doors.
One approach to keeping the wolves fed might be UBI.
They were talking about sheep becoming wolves, not wolves going hungry. Wolves will be wolves. A UBI won’t change that.
Because people will abuse information about you that they find out.
I wonder if there’s another way to keep information abuse from happening.
Remove all humans other than yourself.
Personal reasons.
