zlacker

Why do I think privacy advocates have a list of 'secrets' they fear will be used against them? Because most of them are intelligent people who understand how society works. Society today is full of lies, secrets, and hypocrisy. If someone knows your secrets but you don't know theirs, you're probably vulnerable.

I don't think privacy advocates, and persons such as myself, differ in opinion on the problem today. The difference of opinion is on where we're trying to get to and how we get there.

Tbh, I don't know yet how to get to the end state I'd like to see.

>>m1sta_+(OP)
Ok, so you are making an assumption there. I don't think your assumption holds, it is very well possible to be a privacy advocate and to at the same time not have any crucial secrets worth keeping.

Privacy is a good thing, whether you have secrets worth keeping or not is immaterial, privacy doesn't have anything to do with secrecy. The two are often mixed but if you look a bit longer you'll see that they are in fact orthogonal concepts only very loosely related.

Taking your bathroom example: there is obviously nothing secret about what is going on in that bathroom, you can infer most of it from your own experience. And yet, we do seem to feel the need for privacy.

Another example would be a diary. Diaries are intensely personal and our etiquette around them is that if you happen to come across someone's diary that you do not open it to read it. It is considered a private document, even if it will not contain any secrets it may contain thoughts that the writer does not want to divulge to the world at large.

So privacy does not require any secrets at all to be a very important thing to many people, including privacy advocates.

>>jacque+r
We're into semantics here. Privacy provides a way to hide detail, to prevent confirmation, and to allow people to deny things. For simplicities sake I consider these, or more broadly, anything protected by privacy, to be 'secrets'.

I don't think the word 'crucial' that you added is useful here.

>>m1sta_+qu
Such simplicity is lossy and in this case the loss is crucial, hence that word and that's why sometimes (not always, I'll give you that) semantics matter.

Especially when not seeing that distinction might cause one to state something that is either not true or that inadvertently allows re-framing the discussion in ways that hamper progress.