I'd be keen to hear from philosophers who actually think about this stuff for a living, but, at a gut level, it seems to me that privacy is not equally good across all information sharing situations.
Or maybe a better way to say it: a lack of privacy is not equally bad across all information sharing situations.
> It’s a losing battle…
In the fullest generality, this is probably true. But that doesn't mean there are not particular domains, particular communities, particular situations, in which insisting upon privacy protections is not the right thing to do.
Now, I can already hear folks chiming in about network effects: how am I going to talk privately with community X if community X is already using Goobook? And I agree: this is why the trend is a losing battle.
In kevq's scenario, _maybe_ in the case of a table tennis league private communications are not terribly important (not my call). Maybe it _is_ a little more important that the local community group uses something private, but still not gravely important - but perhaps worth bringing up to that community. Maybe enough people will agree with you, maybe not. But if you stick with the community, even under the surveillance of facebook, then maybe by next year even more people will agree with you. And maybe the year after that people will feel right about switching.
These processes of engagement are important, but changing people's minds, and helping folks to see the value of privacy, for the individual as well as for society at large, is a long slow process. But the more credit you have in a group, the more people will take your arguments and concerns seriously. So, if kevq reads these comments, just stick with it and don't expect folks to change overnight. (I'm sure you don't)
Same goes for the rest of you who feel frustrated. Just remember to pick your priorities (some privacy scenarios are more important than others), and try not to think of it as a fight with those around you. It is a fight with FB, Google, etc, not with your friends and neighbors.
I still do this. I keep a pocket sized card folio and a pen on me at all times. I go on daily walks and take my cards with me. Ideas pop up and I write them down on a card. Once a note is recorded, I insert its card into the back of my folio. Once per week (at least, on a schedule) I empty the folio of ideas and enter them into a my digital notes system (bespoke, made with emacs). From there I can label, associate, file-away, and prioritize different ideas.
I find the main benefit to doing all of this is the ritual itself. By revisiting ideas a couple of times throughout the "card lifecycle", I form associations between disparate thoughts.
For maybe 20% (idk) of the ideas I jot down a smartphone wouldn't have been as easy or as useful. Besides, I like to go on walks without a phone - when I go to record a idea I am guaranteed not to be distracted by some notification or prompt from the rest of life.
If you can stand to look like a throwback or hipster or wackadoodle, I recommend keeping a small note pad or set of cards on you all the time.
another use, less relevant in today's world than in the world of a few years ago: When meeting people at a coffee shop or restaurant, it was nice to hand everybody a card and a pen and ask them to doodle something. This was a nice icebreaker.
Re your cooking example. A virtue ethicist (Aristotle, Augustine, Confucius, ...) might say that you still have work to do.
The idea is that knowing how to cook, and even being good at cooking, are not enough. You're not "perfected" in a particular virtue until you actually experience the value of the practices that the virtue involved.
One way to go about "perfecting" a virtue, from a subjective perspective, is to look at those people you know who do enjoy cooking. These people are exemplars, and you have to be charitable, trusting that there is something to cooking that they see that you do not. You then try again, trying to emulate their approach to cooking - not just the recipes or even the procedures they follow, but also their attitudes toward it. That is how you come to experience the full excellence of cooking. In other words, in the virtue ethicist's view, cooking well doesn't by necessity make you a good cook.
I sort of love projects like this (i.e. the attempts to automate humanity itself by trying to naively quantify experiential subjectivity) exactly because they force the issue. Each silly example of "oh look, a machine can paint, make music, write stories" gives us an opportunity to say: that's not the point.
Or maybe a better way to say it: a lack of privacy is not equally bad across all information sharing situations.
> It’s a losing battle…
In the fullest generality, this is probably true. But that doesn't mean there are not particular domains, particular communities, particular situations, in which insisting upon privacy protections is not the right thing to do.
Now, I can already hear folks chiming in about network effects: how am I going to talk privately with community X if community X is already using Goobook? And I agree: this is why the trend is a losing battle.
In kevq's scenario, _maybe_ in the case of a table tennis league private communications are not terribly important (not my call). Maybe it _is_ a little more important that the local community group uses something private, but still not gravely important - but perhaps worth bringing up to that community. Maybe enough people will agree with you, maybe not. But if you stick with the community, even under the surveillance of facebook, then maybe by next year even more people will agree with you. And maybe the year after that people will feel right about switching.
These processes of engagement are important, but changing people's minds, and helping folks to see the value of privacy, for the individual as well as for society at large, is a long slow process. But the more credit you have in a group, the more people will take your arguments and concerns seriously. So, if kevq reads these comments, just stick with it and don't expect folks to change overnight. (I'm sure you don't)
Same goes for the rest of you who feel frustrated. Just remember to pick your priorities (some privacy scenarios are more important than others), and try not to think of it as a fight with those around you. It is a fight with FB, Google, etc, not with your friends and neighbors.