This. A hundred years ago, if you wrote a diary, it was a private diary; if you wrote a letter, it was a private letter; and if you had a conversation, it was a private conversation. Now, your own thoughts no longer belong only to you.
A hundred years ago if you wrote a diary it was a private diary unless you were involved in a crime, at which point it was read as evidence. If you wrote a letter it was a private letter unless you were involved in a crime, at which point it was read as evidence. Of course, if you were involved in d in espionage or similar large scale crimes your letters were read in transit.
You lived in a small town where everyone knew everything about you: who you talked to, what you said, what books you read and what you did to entertain yourself. If you were one of the small minority who lived in a large town you were still known in your neighborhood and had daily patterns that were easy to observe to anyone that wanted to know.
It is admirable to object to the current policies of various governments when it comes to digital privacy and liberty, but do not paint the past as some place where this privacy once existed. It is a simple fact that in your lifetime you and your peers have enjoyed a greater degree of privacy than any other cohort in the history of humanity. Demand more protection from government actions because of the commensurate growth in the scope of what governments can observe and analyze, not because of some lost blissful state of private existence you imagine an ancestor once claimed.
> It is a simple fact that in your lifetime you and your peers have enjoyed a greater degree of privacy than any other cohort in the history of humanity.
That's as untrue as it can be. At no point in history all people's physical movements, communications, and purchases were tracked and stored in a personally identifiable form for an unlimited amount time by global companies operating in foreign jurisdictions.
I'm late here, but you two seem to be talking about two different versions of privacy.
My read is that evgen is saying "for most of human history, the work required to stay alive has forced humans into the open and exposed much of their lives and movements to their neighbors and community. In this way, humans have not had privacy."
You responded that today companies and governments have much finer-grained data about us and our behaviors than they did even 10 years ago, let alone 50 or 100. True, but these are different claims.
I think we've gained the first kind of privacy and still experienced the privacy loss you mention.
You are right, and I think that his argument about increased offline privacy is completely valid. But what I meant in my initial comment, is that now if I start a new personal document on Google Docs, or if I upload an existing .doc file into Dropbox, I have no control over who, when and for what purpose will access it without my explicit permission. It doesn't necessarily have to be a government agency, whose requests for data don't even require judge's approval in the US[1]. It can even be a machine learning algorithm building a profile on me.
