Musings on privacy
So I just read a substantial paper that debunks the argument many people use to support legislation or technology that would infringe on privacy. "If you've got nothing to hide, what's there to worry about?"
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565&
Basically he states that privacy is a fairly ill defined term, and it has a range of classifications. He goes on to define the problems that the term privacy can encompass. The two main ones are Orwellian surveillance and Kafkaesque problems. Kafkaesque being the kind of situation where another party has so much information about you that before you can take any actions, you're already limited in what you can do.
Anyway, it had me thinking about trying to break down privacy to what it really means. All I've come up with so far is that privacy is like a currency denominated by information. The majority of interactions we have in the world are essentially trades in information. With friends, we share secrets, which is an information trade to build up trust. Similarly, when we go for job interviews, or are looking for romantic partners, we have the ability to release and share information in a way that makes us more desirable.
Where privacy is important is that it allows us options in how we reveal information and when. If you remove privacy, it allows other parties you may want to interact with to assess you on either a) incomplete or incorrect information or b) correct information presented in an unfavorable order. For most cases it's probably a), which is why privacy is important.
I guess an appropriate analogy would be suggesting that life is a bit like a card game. You can spend some time trying to trade for better cards, you can play cards in a beneficial order, you can make intelligent guesses and inferences about other people based on what actions they take. The privacy component is that your hand is hidden information, there should be no desire to give up the advantages that privacy affords even if you're doing nothing wrong, because it can in no way help you in the future. What is happening with big data and data mining is that we're getting so much information from everyone about what they are discarding, what they play and what hands they have that we can start building fairly accurate models about what moves you'll make next.
They've already built a computer program that will consistently beat most humans at rock paper scissors based on big data http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/science/rock-paper-scissors.html?_r=0
It's an interesting thing to consider, but for the time being, fight to hold onto your privacy, otherwise you're giving up your social currency too easily and gaining nothing for it. As I'd say in most games, that's a bad trade.