'It's not about you, it's about your civic duty not to be a member of a predictable populace. If somebody is able to know all your preferences, habits and political views, you are causing severe damage to democratic society.'Ouch! This one hit home for me. It's a strategy I've taken refuge in: my attitude toward secrecy in my early 20s owed a little too much to Ayn Rand -- namely the notion that if you act with integrity you can't be blackmailed, so the important thing was to own your actions and never do anything that could be used against you. This meshed well with the blase attitude I pretended to have about taboos -- I actually would 'do it in the road' if it wouldn't disturb anyone else, I thought, and my understanding of privacy mostly revolved around considerations of relevance and propriety. If you see me naked, I thought, then that's your problem, not mine.
This rationale allowed me to hit the snooze button on an intimidatingly enormous problem -- to wit, increasingly vast asymmetries in the access to information between corporations and stakeholders (a.k.a. governments and citizens). If I believe the information they have access to can't be used to harm me, I can justify ignoring it.
The most obvious weakness of this position is that you can only hold it if you're living a completely conventional existence. It presumes an improbably fortuitous harmony between individual integrity and social mores -- the conflict between which has been the subject of so much dramatic art (especially Ayn Rand's!) that to presume their alignment is to postulate the proverbial spherical cow.
It is, in fact, entirely possible for the hive mind to turn on you for arbitrary and atrocious reasons no matter how clean your conscience is, and a prudent simian is forewarned and forearmed against this possibility. A little education in the internal political history of the CCCP (or better yet, Geneva under Calvin), should be enough to inoculate you against the notion that being a good comrade is any insurance policy whatsoever against chistka. Or if that's too distant for you -- who didn't like Martha Stewart? But she makes one little prudent financial decision that just happens to violate federal finance law, and all of a sudden she's a figure of public disgrace. I have watched news of a complicated domestic dispute spread a miasma over someone's entire social life. It can happen to you -- never doubt it.
Of course there's also a less obvious weakness to this ethos, which is that even if you're quite protected the people you care about may not be. The knee-bone is connected to the thigh-bone, and when your nephew is arrested for buying an 8x11" of LSD it's not just his life that gets upset. Weren't you two quite close? Didn't you take him out on a little trip across the border just last month? Could you pop your trunk for me, sir?
Or, on a completely different tack: how comfortable are you with marketers having an ever more precise idea of how to nudge you into making purchases? Again, if you believe you cannot be gamed and suckered by somebody who knows what you like, you are precisely the person they're looking for. It can be as simple as seeing a book recommendation pop up on your F******k feed for something you were just browsing earlier on A****n, which pushes you over the edge into buying it: sheer generation of coincidence can drive fads and fashions because we unreflectively and automatically interpret them as meaningful, and it does not take a lot of effort to generate artificial coincidences when your main information sources are colluding to sell you shit. It's just con artistry 101 on a vast scale. Even if you're a 9th dan blackbelt in the arts of eluding marketing, your friends and family mostly aren't, and do you want to live in a society that's so easily manipulable? For real fun: do you think politicians won't use this stuff, too?
This nexus of influence can be expanded ever further, but you get the idea: the principle is that observation facilitates control, and systematic obfuscation can make control prohibitively expensive to exercise. If you make yourself hard to observe, you make yourself hard to control, thereby retarding the accumulation of vast imbalances of power. Julian Assange quite explicitly used the converse principle in his little bit of information warfare -- if you make secrecy costly, it gets used less, and a transparent government is easier to control.
This all has very sharp, pointy teeth to it for anyone already living in a regime where the government is actively and explicitly malevolent. But even for those of us in constitutional democracies, there is nothing but a thin tissue of legal precedent separating us from, say, Iran. That tissue may hold out in the end, but I don't want to bet anyone's life on it.
