[LINK] Surveillance

Jim Birch planetjim at gmail.com
Fri Nov 22 15:03:47 AEDT 2013


Elsewhere in Google,

"Google's chief internet evangelist, Vint Cerf, suggests that privacy is a
fairly new development that may not be sustainable. "Privacy may actually
be an anomaly," Cerf said at an FTC event yesterday while taking questions.
Elaborating, he explained that privacy wasn't even guaranteed a few decades
ago: he used to live in a small town without home phones where the
postmaster saw who everyone was getting mail from. "In a town of 3,000
people there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing."

Rather than privacy being an inherent part of society that's been stripped
away by new technology, Cerf says that technology actually created it in
the first place. "It’s the industrial revolution and the growth of urban
concentrations that led to a sense of anonymity," Cerf said. Cerf warned
that he was simplifying his views — "I don't want you to go away thinking I
am that shallow about it" — but overall, he believes "it will be
increasingly difficult for us to achieve privacy."

http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/20/5125922/vint-cerf-google-internet-evangelist-says-privacy-may-be-anomaly


Anthropologists would probably agree, there is limited privacy in tribal
society, everyone tends to know what everyone else is doing and often
actually think they have a "right" to know.  You may not like the tribal
rulers but you don't expect to be able to keep secrets from them.  The
communication revolution returns us to the village - a "global" village
this time - after a historically aberrant period of anonymous city living,
bringing both positive and negative consequences.  From an evolutionary
game theory perspective the impulse to privacy would arise from the desire
for the potential information asymmetry:  knowing more about others than
they know about you.  On the other hand, sexual selection theory would have
you constantly blathering about yourself, aka facebooking .

- Jim



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