I've been toying around with this for a while. My personal Florenovia featured a concept that I have wondered about. What is privacy was an "Opt in" thing as opposed to an "Opt out". With more and more of our society talking about privacy infractions in a world which is being monitored more and more, we are finding privacy a harder thing to define. "The government has no right to see in my bedroom" except I'm typing on a computer next to my bed, and they are probably aware (or can be aware if they care to look) what porn I'm looking at. At the very least, Google knows. Every term of service has a paragraph snuck in there that "takes away our privacy". The impact on us seems to be minimal, but it dawns upon a few that like a carcass attacked by ants, our privacy is being chipped away until there is nothing of substance left.
Now some of those yell and scream and come off as nuts. Others (like me) don't really care except in the larger sense of what this would mean for personal freedom and how we are to protect ourselves when we actually want to. This is where the above erotic sci-fi fiction stories I read in my youth come to mind. In this, everyone was assumed at all times to be under the eyes of the AIs who ran society. People had free choice, and their relationship with the AI was a friendly affair. The AIs mostly acted like one part landlord, one part assistant and one part emergency Medic Alert, so it's all good. Since the AIs as a whole knew everything about you, people talking to an AI ended up talking to a person who had a whole lot of insight into you. They wouldn't gossip, and they wouldn't give details without reason, but they would advise people to the best of their knowledge to the topic they were talking about.
This seems invasive until the other rule is added. Once you invoke privacy on something, the AI would no longer be allowed to remember anything on that "something". The AI wouldn't interfere, (baring medical emergency) see, or consider information gained from that time-span until the privacy block was removed. This being a utopian fiction, this worked out for the best for all involved.
I wonder, however, as to how this would play out in a more real scene. What if the default of the world was like our web history, there and open until we open the privacy tab or delete the entries we don't want seen? What if it were expected that we might be see or recorded leaving the house, but once we enter a certain building, (work, brothel, Las Vegas, whatever) No information leaves. This means our phone would auto track us, the aggregate info could be used to improve traffic flow, eliminate the flawed Nielsen rating system and all these other systems that could be implemented if it weren't a horrible crime against our privacy. If there was anything we actually wanted private, we specify on our digital device or whatever and it then becomes sacrosanct. I'm not so interested in how to implement this, just legal and social ramifications.
This was the only place I could think of that might be up for the task.
I'll wait to link the erotica in question as I don't want this to be sidetracked, as it might be if I posted it.
Please forgive any grammatical errors, It's two hours past bed time and I've been staying up thinking on this.
Black- vs White- listed privacy
Re: Black- vs White- listed privacy
I don't know if I've advocated the position here before, but I'm a proponent of total transparency. I think it will solve a boatload of social problems. The only thing standing between that and us is getting to total non-judgement of unrelated behaviors. The only reason we care about privacy right now is we're afraid of being judged by our family or our bosses. Once we all agree not to render people unemployable pariahs, a surveillance society (note I don't say state) will have much more prompt/cheap police investigations as well as cheaper/faster/more accurate trials. We'll be able to easily locate children, pets, the wandering elderly. You'd think it would be bad for victims of stalkers, but to the contrary it will allow them much more advanced warning if someone is coming to get them.