> I'm glad your have been able to live a life free from problems such as stalkers, domestic abuse, or gender or sexuality issues. Other people are not as privileged.

There is zero correlation between the values I hold in this discussion and what best serves my personal interest. I have the capacity to completely detach myself from my arguments in a way that leads to a lack of bias. I am morally and intellectually selfless.

Legislation should never arise from anecdotes or personal preferences. Would I be abused or stalked, the fact that transparency is inherently superior wouldn't change.

> It would be nice if we could live in an open society, but the reality is that discrimination and abuse still exist. Insisting that everybody forget about privacy is not only going to get some people killed and many others fired. Insisting that privacy is bad is effectively telling any minority that they have to stay "in the closet" if they want to keep their job and not be harassed by the bigots in society.

There is no debate to be had about the fact that pain will be involved in the transition to a transparent society. Of course it won't be easy. However, it would be unreasonable to ignore the biggest problem of our time just because of a short-term friction. Like any form of investment in life, there are short-term drawbacks.

Human reasoning is weird as it understands a loss to be worse than a lack of gain. Loss aversion is the reason why we don't change things, which is the reason we can't get nicer things. People have no idea how much they're missing by trying to preserve "their" privacy.

We're all "in the closet" in some regards. We're also all bigots. We must force people out of their closet. We must expose bigotry. Only then will things start to improve.

> We have the freedom to decide what we want to disclose publicly.

Quoting the Bible would have had the same effect.

> We have the freedom to decide what we want to disclose publicly.

Actually we don't. Should I have the right to erase something from your brain because you saw something I didn't want you to see? Of course I'm not suggesting that we should coerce people into doing anything they don't want to do, but a person's actions shouldn't be protected by any external entity. At the end of the day, an honest person has a lot more to gain by exposing themselves to the world instead of keeping things to themselves. IoT, Wearables, Big Data, AI are all concrete examples of how data gathering can improve people's lives.

> Of course, you still believe in privacy. If you really think privacy doesn't make any sense, post your name, address, bank account numbers, social security number, and any email addresses you've used. None of those items are "secret" information (like a password). I could list a lot more things, but you should get the idea.

Privacy and Transparency are not games you can play alone. They're inherently social. The society is built on top of expectations of privacy. For example, there is some information that I legally couldn't disclose, even if I wanted to. Likewise, my identity is only secured by archaic methods of authentication, which completely breaks if my password gets known. Private key cryptography is not a technology we should build sensitive systems on top of, and it will quickly be destroyed once P = NP gets proven and applied.

Your question is like asking a person to not wear a seat belt in an unsafe car. I might not think that humans should wear seat belts forever, yet I still wear one when I drive my car every day.

Fast-forward 1000 years in the future. Total transparency. Ask a person whether they'd like to keep their name, address, bank account numbers, social security number, email address (assuming these things still exist which they won't). Surely, that person would refuse to make this information private as doing so would make his life miserable considering all the benefits this used to enable.

The least I can ask from people is to discuss this issue seriously, and not just accept privacy to be the solution to all of our problems. This whole obsession with privacy is just a distraction.