> Friendly reminder that prior to the popularization of the internet 20-30 years ago, there was absolutely no equivalent situation where you could have the kind of anonymity the internet provides. It is not any kind of natural right. If you wanted to send or receive information it had to be done in some physical way, so your identity could not really be hidden.
What? You could buy books/magazines with cash. There were literally laws preventing porn rental shops from keeping records on their customers. No one had any idea what you watched on your television or listened to on the radio. There were (are) ham radios. You could record your own tapes, print your own magazines/pamphlets/books, put up your own flyers/posters. There are analytics on every single one of the modern equivalents of these things now, in fact I think you probably have to admit the point of the web has become to add analytics to stuff for advertising.
The era we're living in now is the least private, least anonymous era ever, it just doesn't feel that way because there's a huge inequality in who we're exposed to. In other words, some people argue that in village or tenement life there wasn't a lot of privacy, but that was maybe 40 people knowing when you had sex. Anyone with your smartwatch data has that info now, which a lot more than 40 people; they just don't live anywhere near you (well, probably not anyway).
What? You could buy books/magazines with cash. There were literally laws preventing porn rental shops from keeping records on their customers. No one had any idea what you watched on your television or listened to on the radio. There were (are) ham radios. You could record your own tapes, print your own magazines/pamphlets/books, put up your own flyers/posters. There are analytics on every single one of the modern equivalents of these things now, in fact I think you probably have to admit the point of the web has become to add analytics to stuff for advertising.
The era we're living in now is the least private, least anonymous era ever, it just doesn't feel that way because there's a huge inequality in who we're exposed to. In other words, some people argue that in village or tenement life there wasn't a lot of privacy, but that was maybe 40 people knowing when you had sex. Anyone with your smartwatch data has that info now, which a lot more than 40 people; they just don't live anywhere near you (well, probably not anyway).