Two Downsides of Privacy

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These days people are all talking about privacy, partly thanks to Mr. Snowden's effort. While I definitely support the the individual right of privacy, I want to talk about two downsides of privacy here. But again, I strongly agree that each individual should have full control of her or his information. I just think sometime we might want to trade privacy for more important things.

The first downside is that privacy could lead to distrust. An often used example for supporting privacy is: you got drunk one night and shared a photo of drinking on Facebook. While your friends might like it, your boss doesn't. So people have been designing advanced access control technologies to keep your boss away from your "little secrets". Some people might even avoid using Facebook, considering that some companies require employees' Facebook passwords [2]. However, such personal information disclosure could help others understand you more and thus enhance the relationship. On the other hand, if a person cannot be traced at all on the Internet, he or she will be a mystery in others' eyes. And will you trust a mysterious figure?

The second downside is that privacy might obliviate a person. From East to West, from past to present, an eternal pursue of the mankind is immortality. At least, a person wants to leave something to this world after death, which could only be achieved by a small group of people in the past. This digital age enables immortality to everyone, in the sense that their words and activities on the public Internet can be recorded and kept almost forever. Search engine could retrieve one's words and return to somebody in the future, and we could imagine it as a kind of conversation between the dead and the live. However, privacy would make these information secret to only a few people or even one person, through technologies like encryption. If that person happened to pass away, then his words also gone with him, if no one else knows the password. What a pity if Einstein II encrypted his remarkable theory and then passed away accidentally. Would it be better to publish it on a blog, like this blog?

Update: we all feel really sad about the MH17 tragedy. It has been said that there are more than 100 AIDS researchers on board. And I hope we can rescue their ideas and thoughts as much as possible.



References:

[1] The picture. http://blog.static.abine.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/privacy.jpg?e835a1

[2] http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/01/10/facebook-passwords-employers/4327739/