Not only that, but why is it reasonable to remove the choice of privacy? That's the part that concerns me the most about these discussions, is the way "the internet" should either be all one way, or the complete opposite. That will never be realistic and I feel we should be focusing on the balancing act that works the best for the majority of use-cases.
How would you feel if there was a law that forced you to "forget" anything on request? I mean, did you get explicit consent to see and hear everything you saw and heard? Maybe this wouldn't be a big deal if you get 1-2 requests a year (assuming that forgetting on demand is possible), but what happens when you get millions?
Collecting data is easier than ever before. A lot of small businesses and individuals will start doing it. Can we expect all of them to be able to fulfill these kinds of requests? I'm sure it costs Google millions. This is not reasonable to expect this from anyone or anything.
Knowledge is inherently good. This is not what we should fight against. When bad things happen, the solution is to reduce incentives.
To the 3+ people downvoting me, please explain how I am not adding to the conversation / why you are downvoting.
It's the law of nature, human memory is not perfect.
I can not walk down a street and instantly run facial recognition on everyone, crosslink their FB/Twitter/etc accounts, analyze their text patterns, do NLP on their attitude for recent posts (to assess likely interaction responses), find their social graph of friends, interests, recent purchases, and so on ... as is, that is something that is unique to computers. I mean, it's like you've never heard of the Chilling Effect [1] or think that it's not a big deal, is that the case?
You still have not posted your full browser history from the previous post, why not? How can I be sure you're not trying to subvert the government, HN, or my opinion if you're not fully transparent with your entire life? As you said, "The effect of any "right to privacy" is coercive ignorance. It only really benefits dishonesty and secrecy." ... So again, if knowledge is good and so is transparency, I don't understand why you haven't posted your full browsing history.
In case you're wondering, I did not downvote you (I don't have enough points). But I will reply anyway.
I don't need to have all these "skills" to gain enough information about someone to be able to destroy its life. All I need is to witness something, and tell someone. Is it illegal to witness your male colleague wear a dress and tell others? Is it illegal to tell a friend he's being cheated on? Is it illegal to tell a kid Santa Claus doesn't exist? Should it?
The skills/tools you mention above don't have a qualitative effect on spreading knowledge. They just increase it quantitatively. My eyes won't catch so many things, but they still can catch enough information to have the same effect. And unless you argue that I should need explicit consent before I acknowledge and share anything I hear and see about a person, then I don't think it's reasonable to ban or limit access to tools that increase knowledge and transparency.
The chilling effect is very real. But is it really a bad thing?
