Online private versus public conversations

@cregox Caue Rego
Thu, 14 May 2015 18:21:12 +0000

@cregox wrote:

Not to say it's a different concern for privacy, I still call this shame: people will say companies can harm you with your data if it's not private.

Health insurance might refuse giving you service if you simply search for a disease concerning a family member, for instance. So, basically, minorities might be picked up even by government which would select who gets benefits depending on their public profile, regardless of how accurate it is.

I'm a big minority, by the way. I've got my credit score below zero for over a decade thanks to literally a couple of things I never really did. Also thanks to the uncanny amount of stupid bureaucracy required to prove I didn't. And, I do take some fault, thanks as well that I had signed up some papers about 15 years ago. I also have had my USA tourist visa denied 3 times, again mostly due to inaccurate public profiling. Just to name a few.

So I do know very well how it is to be victim of wrong people getting the wrong impression from me, even before I can present myself.

And, yet, I still think 100% transparency benefits extremely overwhelms all those issues.

In fact, if my profile data have ever been misinterpreted, it was due to lack of data and not excess of it. And, sure, bad analysis might also play a role there, but then who's really to blame? Rhetorical question, of course.

We shouldn't be afraid of giving out information about ourselves just because other people might misjudge us, just because we feel ashamed.

Bank security doors.

I hate every single time have to empty my pockets (for one, because I have many pockets with gadgets) just to go in and ask for a simple information. But the issue for me isn't exposing myself. In fact, I'd love they already knew I have nothing wrong. If all my data was easily available and I could opt into that, just to have a free pass on those doors, I sure would.

What I hate there is how much of a child's play that security really is. There's nothing secure there. Unless you really use costs versus benefits for securing out anything, it won't work. There will be someone willing to exploit it, and pay the costs, to get a profit. So, they're just wasting our time and patience with that freaking security boring theater.

Picture an utopian world in which whoever opts in to be fully transparent get such "benefits". The huge majority. The benefits would not even be seeing so much as good, as they'd be average. And whoever wants to hide something will be considered a threat. Sure, we'll still give them the benefit of the doubt, it could be something else going wrong, like being ashamed, but that would be what's frowned upon instead of looking down on who wants to share every piece of data (as it is today).

Hard to imagine, but I find it beautiful.

And all this text certainly became too confusing... Oh well, something for me to eventually read in the future and see once again how much I still had to polish to become whatever I became.

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