.arunim.fyiNotes on and responses to Vitalik’s blog on privacy
Noting the extreme irony that this set of notes was, for a while, not publicly available!
Initially, my thoughts are that I might prefer a society where power is decentralized but all actions taken by all individuals are known. I think this is more likely to drive social progress than one which is the same but all actions are unknown.
the average conversation, and even financial transaction, being fully and unconditionally private is the multi-thousand-year historical norm
I mean this is way too strong a claim. Gossip has always existed. What has actually been the multi-thousand-year historical norm is your actions being tied to your identity. In-person, you could not pretend that the words you said did not come out of your mouth. True, information wasn’t broadcasted as widely or collected directly by the various actors who wish to accumulate it, but it did make its way around. I worry about what happens when your actions can become disconnected from your identity! Some social media platforms seem to indicate that people will readily take this opportunity to say rude things, and in some ways, let out the worst of themselves.
In a sort of “beware isolated demands for rigor” way, I think what we both agree on is that partial, selective privacy is bad. I think I agree that we are closer to full privacy than we are to no privacy in terms of how much effort it’d take to get there, and possibly the closest / most feasible better world is one with much stronger privacy guarantees.