A reasonably-written article in the New York Times. What troubles me is the attitude that privacy really doesn’t matter, which seems to be gaining traction in some circles.
[…] some collective-intelligence researchers argue that strong concerns about privacy rights are a relatively recent phenomenon in human history.
“The new information tools symbolized by the Internet are radically changing the possibility of how we can organize large-scale human efforts,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the M.I.T. Center for Collective Intelligence.
“For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,” Dr. Malone said. “In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/business/30privacy.html
The most surprising pro-publicity, anti-privacy guy I know is a self-described Conservative Libertarian, defined (by him) as one step from total Anarchy.
Yet he thinks he has nothing to hide. Now, that’s quite possible on an absolute scale of honesty and truth. However, and I cannot reconcile this with his politics, he actually trusts the government.
He doesn’t otherwise impress me as a fool but on this one point.