Privacy (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Surveillance) | INFJ Forum

Privacy (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Surveillance)

Rcs6r

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What is privacy?

How much do you value it?

How much do you feel is necessary in your every-day life?

What do you think of governments and corporations surveilling your data for security / targeted advertising purposes?
 
I see privacy as "no one else knowing" and I value it quite a bit. It is honestly necessary for my happiness.

I think what happens when we cede private space to the public (think social media) we trade a higher degree of freedom for a lower one. People are generally willing to be honest in private space, whereas they're not so willing in public space. For obvious reasons. Who'd want to say something offensive to a thousand people? Very few have the energy to cope with that and continue their lives in a healthy manner. Anyway, this thinking extends very deeply into the mind. It can go as far as people being unwilling to be entirely honest with themselves in public space. And much further - to complete conformity.

Also, I think the transition of vast chunks of life moving into public space is what feeds things such as "political correctness," which in my mind is a form of harmonization. A very unhealthy kind of harmonization though. It's a collective attempt to make everyone's mentality and morality uniform through asserting concrete "rights" and "wrongs". A lot of these "rights" and "wrongs" would normally occupy a gray area, but through strong enough assertions they seem concrete. And, of course, if you're "wrong" be prepared to face rather extreme consequences. It's sort of like a religion in this regard. Harmony is good, but only the natural kind. Forced harmony is an obvious contradiction.

Private space is essential for civilization and the less private space we have the more barbaric and uniform society will be. Healthy divergence, uniqueness and so on are things that traditionally only occur with high degrees of isolation and privacy. Consider a writer writing a book. It's considered normal for a writer to completely remove himself/herself from society in order to free their mind from emotional and intellectual constraints. And with these constraints almost always active, divergence and uniqueness are greatly diminished and might one day be extraordinarily rare. If the trends continue well into the future, anyway.

Another example would be the many unique cultures that existed during ancient times. Isolation was required for that uniqueness. Exposure to a "dominant" culture creates uniformity through conformity - forced or voluntary. This is currently happening with Western culture. And things such as globalization and the popularity of Hollywood help facilitate this process. One day, I imagine, the entire world will be painted the same color and by the same brush. A nightmare. And the incremental reduction of individual privacy plays a role in this.

Honestly, I have completely removed myself from mainstream social media and I simply ignore the vast majority of mass media. I'm much happier and more able to function normally.

As for governments and corporations spying on people through the internet, that's obviously appalling behavior. I completely disagree with it. The purpose for it doesn't matter. It's clearly not justifiable.

I hope I wasn't too off-topic.
 
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I value privacy immensely at a personal level and don't have much to do with other people face to face that could result in emotional exposure.

As far as government surveillance as to my online activities, I am not particularly concerned or interested because I am not concerning or interesting at that level. Though in some ways it bothers me. If ever it comes to blackballing and ruining people for political beliefs a la McCarthy era, I am aware I could fall afoul of whatever the going belief system is. But it really doesn't stop me from being less reserved than I should be I guess.

Honestly, I am more annoyed with my search history, personal e-mails and other online activities being used for targeted marketing. It feels rather violating.
 
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I honestly don't care if the government is snooping into my online activities. I do nothing illegal and I have nothing to hide. I do however care when my searches are used for targeted advertising. It's just rude. Thankfully that's why we have ad blocker software. :)
 
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I honestly don't care if the government is snooping into my online activities. I do nothing illegal and I have nothing to hide. I do however care when my searches are used for targeted advertising. It's just rude. Thankfully that's why we have ad blocker software. :)

You might start to care if they sell this data for gerrymandering. They could find how people are likely to vote based on their online activities and then remap districts accordingly in order to win elections that they otherwise couldn't win.
 
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We have talked a lot about online privacy so far in my degree. For a while I have been intending to share this interesting article that was on the reading list for a class I took, by danah boyd, about online privacy and publicity. It's a conference transcript. I recommend this article to everyone who shares aspects of their self on the web. Obviously, there is too much of me already on this forum to be bothered with trying to escape from what I have posted, but the article really changed the way I approach the internet, and got me thinking about it all a lot more. In terms of sharing self, there are certain sites you have to be really careful of. For example, everything you post on tumblr will continue to be owned by you - however, everything you post on Facebook will be owned by Facebook.

You should always try to anonymise yourself on the internet. If you are sharing your legal name, you should be very careful about the kinds of things that you attach to that name. It is your legal identity and it is very related to a lot of things that you will want to do in your life. I go on Facebook and I see people sharing all sorts of things about themselves and their opinions, they seem unaware that they are damaging their legal reputation. This world is an incredibly cruel place, and amidst all of this cruelty nothing is more valuable to you than your legal identity. You should always be mindful of what you do with your legal identity. Unless you want a career in politics, the last thing it should be is a means to broadcast your personal prejudices or political priorities, regardless of how progressive you think you are being. Think carefully about how you are using your legal identity and the things that you want to achieve in your life. The most important thing is what you will achieve, not the opinions that you publically identify yourself with.
 
Thank you [MENTION=1814]invisible[/MENTION] for that article. It provided some very good information for me. I'm just as guilty of posting too many personal things about myself here, but I do try to maintain a certain degree of anonymity unless I trust the people I share things with implicitly. And at least this forum is certainly a tad bit safer than FB... Thank goodness I'm sticking to my guns about being free from Facebook's rather long and sharp talons.
 
Dr. Strangelove reference in the title.

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