> Under this reasoning, most all privacy is as good as dead and we are just waiting for the technology to get here.
Because it is! Thank you, somebody finally noticed. You can't preserve privacy and push technology forward, it's either-or. The best we can hope for is, if we chose to continue on the path of progress, that we'll establish social customs around expected privacy, that will amount mostly to "gentlemen turn around and do not look when a lady is undressing in a shared room" and to the privacy of correspondence ("we obviously can read your mail, but it's a common courtesy that we don't"). But you can't stop the fact that we're all radiating information to the world. And there's nothing invasive in collecting it - you don't have to touch me, you just have to stand within my light cone and take a look around.
There is, but I don't believe it balances out, not in the slightest. You can obstruct a channel, but I can use others to reconstruct it. Everything you do leaves casual traces within your lightcone - be it low-level like your reflection in the shop window, or high-level like behaviour of your spouse being influenced by his knowledge about your plans, which can help reconstruct them even if you lie about them. It's like with error correction - you can try and damage the information, but we're figuring out more and more ways in which to recreate it.
At some point, to protect privacy, you'll have to expend a lot of computing power on lying about everything to everyone around you - which is not exactly a way to live or run a society.
I strictly compartmentalize. You could call it lying, I suppose. But it's mostly just not sharing anything between compartments. There's nothing complicated for me to remember.
Because it is! Thank you, somebody finally noticed. You can't preserve privacy and push technology forward, it's either-or. The best we can hope for is, if we chose to continue on the path of progress, that we'll establish social customs around expected privacy, that will amount mostly to "gentlemen turn around and do not look when a lady is undressing in a shared room" and to the privacy of correspondence ("we obviously can read your mail, but it's a common courtesy that we don't"). But you can't stop the fact that we're all radiating information to the world. And there's nothing invasive in collecting it - you don't have to touch me, you just have to stand within my light cone and take a look around.