Not only is privacy a fundamental right within a society but it is fundamentally necessary to the advancement, and thus long term survival, of any society.
> how the advancements in western society since (say) WWII have been neccesarily dependant upon privacy?
Alan Turing. Hell, Tim Cook, a gay man who grew up in Alabama. Neither would have survived childhood with their personalities intact had their governments had the access No. 10 Downing demands.
Privacy preserves society’s margins. The margins, by definition, are where change—growth—is nurtured.
However your examples don't demonstrate how the many advances in western society depend upon privacy nor do they prove that it would not have advanced without privacy.
Alan Turing, for example, was open about his sexuality (an issue that bit him when a robbery took place long after his work at Bletchley).
Even had he been somehow taken out of the picture pre WWII it remains true that Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski would still have cracked the Enigma cipher, built the prototype Bombe's and passed that knowledge to the likes of Tommy Flowers and William Thomas Tutte.
Turing proved a result applicable to the third part of Hilbert's second problem, the Entscheidungsproblem.
He was very nearly beaten to that as a first by Kurt Gödel who provided an answer to the first two parts of Hilbert's second while indicating an approach to the third part.
Turing was beaten to the goal by Alonzo Church who demonstrated the halting problem for lambda calculus is not effectively calculable.
Later, in 1939 J. Barkley Rosser highlighted the essential equivalence of "effective method" defined by Gödel, Church, and Turing.
So, uhh, yes - it would be nice to see some notion of proof come to in to play here.
No discovery depends solely on one person. The example illustrates the mechanics in the last line.
Fringe elements are analogous to a society's surface. They, by definition, interact with novel elements and ideas at a higher rate than population.
Internal interactions exchange information. That distributes information (physical and intellectual). It also increases entropy and thus homogeneity. Conductivity (the term of art is legibility [1]) and complexity are at odds with one another.
Ceteris paribus, internal homogeneity shouldn't change the surface. But humans have agency. Homogeneity precedes conformity which drives more homogeneity. Furthermore, less diversity means fewer novel opportunities/interactions between the fringe and the unknown.
Privacy preserves a diversity of fringes which drives social complexity. A society without privacy is simpler, and thus less capable of innovation, than one with it. (There is obviously an upper bound to this phenomenon. A perfectly opaque system is static. But humans, as social creatures, resist isolation more naturally than conformity.)
1. You cannot compare Cook to Turing with a straight face, even in terms of their sexuality situation.
2. Privacy is about as personal of a fight to Cook as shareholder obligations are, and only one of them gets him removed if he neglects it.
3. It's pretty fucking stupid to suggest the UK would do the same thing to Turing today if they had the data. You may recall that there are now laws in both the UK and, yes, Alabama since 2009, that render this a hate crime and deter it properly. It's the lamest possible excuse to support corporate power.
Ultimately Tim Cook will say whatever gets investors horny. If you're dumb enough to factor his sexuality in to your trust quotient, you deserve to be XKeyscored.
As long as humans remain irrational and tribalism exists, privacy is essential to anyone that isn't the most boring, vanilla, cookie person that has any amount of non-mainstream ideas or beliefs or qualities.
I think, in theory, a society with much less privacy could work, as long as there is information symmetry, not a panopticon controlled by a few. We're not building an open society, though. The asymmetry is the point.
If we ignore the open society angle and assume surveillance would be one sided:
Competition is needed for healthy capitalist economies. Competition doesn't work well with great power imbalances. To the extent entrenched business could leverage the government, as they do, powers of surveillance could be used to stifle competition. That leads to stagnation.
Democracy, even in a limited form, doesn't work when everyone is under surveillance by a powerful minority. I don't think I need to elaborate since there's been plenty of writing on that.
Also, people don't want to make civic contributions to a society that treats them like cows with a criminal bent. There's not much argument against being a hedonic leech in a society that benefits from your labor but resents your autonomy.
I haven't answered your question exactly, but it's a bit difficult when framed that way. I still think it's pretty clear that the massive power imbalance that comes with dragnet surveillance can catalyze corruption, stagnation, and malaise, thus impeding progress.
> I think, in theory, a society with much less privacy could work...
I suspect what many forget or were perhaps unaware of is the in practice society with near zero privacy existed for the vast bulk of actual human history.
Before the car and the radical change in individual human movement that came about for those parts of the world privileged enough to have a car for every family the majority of people lived within a small radius surrounded by people who effectivel knew every detail of each others lives .. if not as it happened then almost certainly by the next quarter as word spread.
Again, as I mentioned above, I like privacy .. but it remains true that the greatest expansions of modern western economies; mass production, feeding quantitively more with less land and labour, etc .. all happened without any essential dependance upon privacy to bring these changes about.
It is the upstream grandparent claim that privacy is fundemental and essential for any advancement in a society that doesn't pass the smell test and certainly hasn't yet been well argued for.
I absolutely do agree that it is desirable .. but essential (in a strict sense) for the continuation of human society .. that needs better argument to pass muster.
> Before the car and the radical change in individual human movement that came about [...]
The lack of privacy in a local town is surely quite different in its effect on society than a centralized and wide reaching dragnet surveillance program. That local lack of privacy was limited in reach, not automatic nor persistent, and mostly symmetric... which doesn't present the same potential harms.
Wrong. Society is just a social construct, but your right to independent thought and agency, which is powered by privacy, are fundamental to the human experience.
No one is taking away anyone's right to independent thought, at least for now.
Patent was talking about privacy though, I'm not sure our species has a fundamental right to it, how did you arrive at that conclusion?
It's a bit difficult to grasp the reasoning behind humans not having the fundamental right to privacy. It seems like the right to privacy/private communication with other sentient creatures is corollary to the right to independent thought, since humans are fundamentally social creatures with an inbuilt need to communicate.
I'm a bit curious how you arrived at the conclusion that you're "not sure our species has a fundamental right to [privacy]". That seems like the absurd claim requiring actual support here, seeing as how privacy is the norm, not the other way around.
> I'm a bit curious how you arrived at the conclusion that you're "not sure our species has a fundamental right to [privacy]". That seems like the absurd claim requiring actual support here, seeing as how privacy is the norm, not the other way around.
I didn't claim anything, I said I wasn't sure. Our species is much much older than the concept of privacy. Back when we were still sitting in trees there was no privacy. We decided that that was a thing quite a bit later. Now in the year 2023 I would say many of us see privacy as a fundamental human right though obviously and a privilege to defend.
Having rights is a social construct. Unless you believe in divine order of things. But I suspect there’s nothing in physical reality that requires any rights to be granted to anyone.
The religious far outnumber the not so I think your "unless" is really the norm. Talking only the various Jesus fanclubs you have a literal divine right to privacy in confession and it's sinful to reveal another's secrets. The Adam and Eve creation myth establishes privacy when God created clothes.
The very concept natural rights is basically divine rights but without explicitly mentioning a god.
If having rights is a social construct as opposed to a universal truth, then you don't have any rights at all. You have temporary granted permissions, but not fundamental rights.
As such, it's much more likely that they are universally true rather than a result of human consensus.
There are no rights in the first place without a society. The entire concept of "a right" is meaningless if it isn’t in the context of a social contract.
The parent post defined “human rights” as something from holy scriptures. What I can see from being part of highly functional societies is that they require me to give up a big part of my privacy. Like, I can’t get salary without bank account. Which I can’t get without submitting a whole lot of personal information to the bank. There’re many essential services which you can’t access anonymously. At a very least “privacy” isn’t a binary category. There could be more privacy or less privacy, but not 100%.
One more example: some societies will require you to disclose any relation to politically exposed persons. Which is beneficial to society, but I can’t withhold even if I wanted.
