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People have always been able to keep some secrets. It's not that we can have no privacy, just not the kind of broad privacy that people have come to expect.
The problem is that electronic records and the copious quantities in which we are creating them lead to a sort of all or nothing kind of situation. I agree that it may be unreasonable to expect my google searches to remain private (although I suspect many people might disagree), but I'm not confident any meaningful privacy is possible in the face of all the records that get created with almost every moment of my life. A little bit of correlation and all of a sudden I am a completely open book.
I would love for it to be. but I don't see how I can achieve something like that given all the angles by which someone might determine it.
- I turn my lights out when i go to bed => all my neighbors roughly know my sleeping schedule
- I stop using my phone while sleeping => any service it reaches out to can probably guess my sleeping schedule. All the websites I log in to can probably guess my sleeping schedule, too.
- I never use my credit card while sleeping. With a little bit of historical data, they probably know my sleep schedule.
- Utility companies certainly know my sleep schedule.
And these are just the angles I can think of. I'm sure I'm missing quite a few.
I expect it to be private in the sense that I want it to be and I don't like that other people know it, but since I do very little to control the loss of this information, I don't see how my expectation is reasonable.
Yeah exactly (and you're making part of my point for me.)
One of the nym-preservation things I taught myself to do is to mix up work/wake times among nyms, and sometimes multitask (as treacherous as that is on its own!) across different electronic identities using multiple (and unlinked) devices... it's hard at times. It's also probably not worth it for most. I refuse to sleep at times other than when I am sleepy though, so there can still be patterns.
The correlation points start at your modem hardware - be it a phone or a fibre router and from there on propagates. I do like that we have randomized hardware identities for wifi connectivity now though. That's a win. But overall, from a time & place perspective (with or without your actual name attached to it) I think that the chance that anyone can truly evade this while using non-burner phones and laptops, is minimal.
If privacy is a sort of anarchy where only the (technically) strong preserve their privacy, what good is the theory and stuff in max's book? It seems I should be reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to Anonymity not Praxeology of Privacy.
Praxeology is the study of human action. It's a social science discipline that attempts to describe human behavior.
The title implies an attempt to describe how privacy relates to behavior (or perhaps the other way around).
Hmm you should probably read both, but for the latter to be efficient you literally are required to become a German resident or it is all for nothing. So maybe stick with Max' book for the moment.
Also, it doesn't have to be this way. For example, Apple has been pretty much privacy-enhancing in many areas, except of course corporate failure #1 to identify oneself as a threat consumers need to be protected against too. But, we can build software and hardware that is privacy preserving - although sometimes one would need to creatively find holes in laws - and do the hard work for people.
I think that step 1 is awareness and step 2 is habits though, and only then, when you understand the habits, can you automate the important things.
I don't disagree with the assessment of the situation.
I don't agree that there must be a way to have our cake and eat it too. Being linked to the entire world electronically has immense benefits and it makes us highly visible in ways we haven't really come to terms with yet.
Let's think about it with respect to money though: in a system such as Bitcoin, where each utxo is uniquely identified and the ledger is public, privacy seems necessary, even if it is unrealistic. If we are unable to keep our identity separate from our utxos, is Bitcoin viable?