> Yes, it's harder to make something more private than it is to make it more transparent. Absolutely. You can go nuts trying to make your life as private as humanly possible, and then all it takes is one exception to the rules, like surveillance in the name of national security, followed by an unfortunate misuse of that data or an unfortunate hack, and now your eggshell defense of privacy has failed, and you have no cultural or legal infrastructure protecting your now very transparent life.

Correct me if I am wrong, but that boils down to "it's easier to publish your own information that to keep it secret", doesn't it?

How does that answer the question why you think that forcing the elite to be more transparent is easier than gaining/protecting the privacy of the common person?

Why is the eggshell defense of privacy an eggshell defense, but the enforced transparency of the elite is robust? (or is it?)

As far as I can tell, you are still simply assuming that enforcing transparency of the elite is comparatively easy, with no justification whatsoever, yet all of your argument seems to depend on that actually being true.

> Ask anyone famous how hard it is to maintain a private life. It's much easier to go in the direction of transparency than backwards towards more privacy.

I don't think that's actually accurate. There are plenty of famous people with a pretty private private life. There are many more factors at play when people's wealth is essentially in them being known, where "being known" necessarily implies that people know something about their private lives. The relationship between paparazzi and celebrities in particular is generally much more of a symbiosis than it's often being portrayed.

> It takes an enormous amount of effort to obfuscate your writing style and all your proper nouns, and it's not just effort. I think it costs you a piece of your humanity.

I am not sure what any of this has to do with the discussion at hand?!

> Putin and Erdogan get away with what they do because of asymmetric information. If their misbehaviour is similarly broadcast, then it levels the playing field.

So, Putin and Erdogan get away with killing and imprisoning journalists and shutting down newspapers only because there are no critical newspapers and journalists broadcasting their misbehaviour? Like, first there were no critical journalists and newspapers, and then Putin and Erdogan started killing and imprisoning and shutting down critical journalists and newspapers that didn't actually exist anyway? Could you explain?

> And it changes journalism from being about leaking information and more about better analysis of information, its veracity, its implications, etc, as information would go from being valuable to being a commodity.

Apart from the fact that it's still just a baseless claim of yours that that kind of transparency is in any way realistic to actually achieve: That's actually not as big a change as you make it out to be. It's akin to saying that building operating rooms in every school in the country would change medicine from being about having access to an operating room to being about performing a surgery. Millions of pages of government documents are about as useful to the public at large as operating rooms: Almost not at all. Without someone who has hard-earned specialized knowledge about how to use it, it might just as well not be there. The value comes from understanding the information, not from having overwhelming heaps of it at your fingertips. And the centralization that comes with the required expertise to be able to distill out the important bits comes the weakness where those in power can attack to keep information under control. If you put all surgeons in prison, the availability of operating rooms is of zero value to the public.

Or to put it more succintly: Just because books about everything that you could study at a university are readily available from amazon, in practice, not everyone is an expert in every academic field. Public availability of information does not automatically translate into the general public being well-versed in it by a long shot.

> Right now, the wealthiest do appear to be writing the tax code.

May I suggest you think about what the tax code would look like if it indeed were being written by the wealthiest? Just because it is giving the wealthiest an advantage doesn't mean it's as bad as it would be, were it to be written by the wealthiest.

> And no, I do not think you should override the wishes of the people the data is about (within reason). That's central to my point. It turns knowledge into responsibility instead of power.

Would you agree then that the state should protect the citizens' privacy and give them the legal tools to force others to respect their wishes?