The first thing the Nazis did when they marched into the Netherlands, the took the religious information from the citizens register to deport all Jews.

Oppressive regimes are using information to track down dissidents and let them vanish.

If you want to blast out every detail of your life, be m guest.

But forcing your idea of life and safety down everyone’s throught is not the way to go.

Can i have password to your account, please?

Give me all of your account passwords, right now.

Tell me your dick size and will tell you why you need privacy.

People deserve privacy because there are many things they want to protect, and it’s their prerogative on how much they’re willing to share.

A lot of the things we hide could be used to hurt us if someone with malicious intent had access to them. Our account logins, our bank accounts, ways to access our houses.

Tell me your views on if children deserve privacy?

So, you love absolute transparency, but you hate privacy. Alright. Then you will answer my questions truthfully.

Where do you live? How much income do you have per month? What is your bank account number? Do you use VISA or Mastercard? What is your credit card number including the expiration date and the CVC?

And no, I am not a troll, troll.

Hey, appreciate you opening the floor for genuine discussion. I’ll do my best to give you real arguments rather than the usual noise you’ve probably encountered.

First, a key distinction that often gets muddled: Privacy isn’t secrecy. Nobody’s arguing for a right to conceal wrongdoing. Privacy is about control over information flow—deciding when, to whom, and how much you disclose. Rejecting privacy because some people use it to hide bad things is like rejecting doors because some people lock them for bad reasons.

The power asymmetry problem: “Absolute openness for everyone” sounds egalitarian, but in practice it creates an infrastructure that benefits the powerful. If all transactions, communications, and associations are public, who has the resources to actually exploit that data? Corporations for profiling, governments for political monitoring, employers for discrimination, insurers for risk assessment. Ordinary people can’t process or act on that ocean of data—but Facebook, Google, and state agencies sure can. So paradoxically, radical transparency tends to increase power concentration rather than flatten it.

Chilling effects are real and documented: When people know they’re being observed, they self-censor. This affects dissent, minority viewpoints, identity exploration, support group participation, even just the freedom to make mistakes and grow. There’s a reason secret ballots exist—transparency in how you voted would enable intimidation. The principle scales.

The open source thing is interesting: You mention using mostly open-source software, which is itself a privacy-preserving choice. Open source lets you audit what your software does, resist opaque surveillance, and maintain control over your computing environment. So you’re already practicing a form of privacy advocacy at the infrastructure level, even if you reject it at the personal data level. Maybe the tension is that you want institutional transparency (governments, corporations accountable to the public) but don’t see the need for personal privacy—and those aren’t actually in conflict. You can want both.

**On being statistically outnumbered: **Fair point that majority opinion isn’t proof of correctness. But I’d suggest the pushback you’re seeing isn’t purely ideological—many people arrive at privacy preferences through lived experience: harassment, doxxing, stalking, discrimination, political persecution, identity theft. These aren’t hypothetical edge cases.

What I’d genuinely propose instead of absolute openness: Contextual integrity—the idea that information flows are appropriate when they respect social context. Your health data belongs with your doctor, not advertisers. Political donations belong with regulators for accountability, but not necessarily with your employer. Corporate filings should be public, but your browsing history shouldn’t.

The real question isn’t “privacy vs. transparency” but “what deserves transparency and what deserves protection?” And those answers differ depending on whether we’re talking about a government official’s finances or a regular person’s medical records.

I’m curious though—what specifically drives your transparency preference? Is it institutional accountability? A belief that human nature handles openness well? Something else? I’d like to understand the steel-manned version of your position better, because I think there’s a real conversation to be had about where the lines should actually be drawn.