Good point... I don't think that kind of thing will be much of an issue, though, because corporations like to save money by hiring the lowest salary staff from the largest pool of potential employees as possible.

As much as I'd like to believe that workplace diversity policies were implemented purely for progressive civil rights reasons (and I do applaud some of the brilliant and talented HR reps that can make everyone and themselves believe it!) it's obviously in their interests to "overlook" a lot of stuff that might come up from a moderately extensive background check, if it helps them stuff more warm bodies into a chair for less money. The labor force will become much more like the mechanical turk... remote, faceless, unseen. Heck, we're already just a number. Then later on if something bad happens, they can just say "oh, how were we to know employee #4872030 was a psycho?"

Sure, maybe small time employers still lack the sense to do less extensive background research... so in that case, hope you only shared the stuff that's kosher! So in a sense, if you already assume we have full transparency and Someone is always watching what you're doing, you should already be in good shape.

Just as an aside, I did go to a Catholic school for a few years as a kid, and it wasn't that bad. Granted, it was an international school next to a US Embassy, though most of the US Embassy brats went to a more expensive international school across town. In retrospect it was pretty well run... We said the morning prayers (well, the glee club eventually started singing it) along with the national flag anthem during morning assembly, and other than that, there wasn't much religion. OK, actually there was also a religion class period, but you could choose to do the Catholic one, the Buddhist one, the Muslim one, or the Hindu one, or if you were just a dirty atheist/agnostic like me, you'd be lumped into the "Values" class which was essentially another social studies/psychology group. The only thing I remember is a picture in the textbook of two girls licking an ice cream cone together. We laughed our way through it then, but still, when I came back to the US school system, I felt that it was something that was missing here... there weren't really any classes that tried to teach you how to share and be nice and get along with others. So if you didn't get it from your parents or church, well, then you just don't get it here in the US. Huh.

I'm just saying if we can embrace the positive parts of full transparency, that will be better than the fallacy of believing we can successfully safeguard our privacy.

Unless you live as a hermit in the middle of the Yukon, I don't really see how you might expect to have fully guaranteed privacy rights while living in society. Someone's going to gossip about you. Might be more effective to limit the damage they can do with whatever information they manage to glean by flying their X-Ray UAV over your house, than rely on some kind of "promise" from your neighbors or government to ever fly their X-Ray UAV anywhere they might accidentally see you.

I have a gun safe too. The manual has a little serial number on it that helps the manufacturer open it if requested. I don't know how well that information is protected from hackers, probably not that well. If someone takes my little airsoft gun out of the safe and uses it to commit a crime, I hope I get a good shot of the perp on my webcam. In any case, I've probably demonstrably done enough due diligence to keep that gun under my control, so I'm not sure what more relevance that strawman has to this conversation.

As far as people going through your personal effects, yes, it can and has happened. Maybe you have an accident or get heat stroke or get knocked unconscious. People are going to go through your pockets looking for ID or medicalert bracelets. Maybe they come across your stash or some kind of embarrassing toy that you didn't have locked up in a briefcase handcuffed to your wrist. You're not going to sue your good samaritans for invasion of privacy, I'd hope.

Secret business plans is an interesting one... of course even friendly countries spy on each others' businesses now, and even have regulatory limits on the strength of encryption that can be used within their borders to help with this. Business intelligence is kept in confidentiality primarily for control while negotiating... you can finagle a higher price for your shit while negotiating if you keep your trade secrets and special sauce to yourself, as well as coordinate bidding wars between competitive offers for your products and services. With more information and transparency, the work would still get done, but you may have to give up some of your ability to boost profits by lying or embellishing... whatever's fair. And perhaps disclose and license your trade secrets as patentable intellectual property, because, well, it'd probably get out eventually anyway. Or, like the Coke recipe, just maintain it as a secret special sauce for marketing mystique, even though people can analyze exactly what went into it anyway. Eh.

What about reading your thoughts? We could be getting closer to that over the next few decades, with passive sensors that will probably be part of our video game consoles soon, and maybe even deeper and more detailed with cybernetic implants like TFA suggests.

Yes, I agree privacy rights ought to be a fundamental thing. It's also a pretty certain thing that we've already pretty much lost it already, save for a little bit of data integration. Rather than ending this line of questioning, we need to start standing up the next line of defense... more limits against prosecution for "thought pre-crimes", limiting abuse of power from government / corporate / societal data mining (which probably also involves increasing transparency to all of the archives they do have), making sure we can watch the watchers...

And there's no "disruptive innovation" here... as an engineer who has held several "public trust" positions over the decades handling plenty of classified / PCI / PII data (as are many more of us here at /. ), we're quite accustomed to having a lot of scrutiny, monitoring, and accountability for every little thing we do in the line of work. So we've sort of been living that way for a while now. Yeah, it'll suck to see more of that disciplined environment creep into "civilian" life. But such is the way of the world, and good luck avoiding it without blasting ourselves back into the stone age (or Northern Canada ;)

Yeah, I think that it's possible (and that it's actually already happening) that society will become more accepting (and supporting!) of diversity. A healthy ecosystem is a diverse one, and is able to use and take advantage of the individual strengths of each of its members.

Yeah, very idealistic, probably too much for homo sapiens, but maybe an advanced race of cybernetic organisms could handle it. Or perhaps they won't really have a choice since their black boxes could be subpoenaed.

Heh, as a parent, I would feel like a failure if there was something that my kids wouldn't feel comfortable confiding with me. But they're not yet teenagers, so we'll see. I suppose my own youth may have been atypical... brought home my first porn stash when I was 7 or something (someone left a bundle in the neighborhood playground trash can). My parents found it... and let me keep it. My mother was a fairly conservative asian, but my dad (who's pretty much that hippie perv uncle type) convinced her that if they were ever going to raise a medical doctor, I'd have to not be squeamish around "anatomy". So yeah, maybe not everyone would grow up with such, er, "understanding" parents, but it seems like with the internet and all, people are really opening up about formerly taboo topics and talking more comfortably about masturbation and menstruation and accepting of different viewpoints, if only because, hey, there are some real wackos out there. In all likelihood this trend will continue for at least a generation, until they rebel against it for reasons.

Yes, politics... it's a long shot, because people love to argue about this kind of stuff like it really matters to them personally, but idealistically that kind of thing will eventually relegate itself in status to "administrative overhead" which should be minimized so we can all just get on with our lives. Yes, politicians make it sound like it's the most important thing ever, because that's the only way they can get power in this world, and we let them. So there will always be people trying to assert their power over others, the question is how can we limit that. I don't think the answer is by trying to guarantee privacy, because as you mentioned, if someone really holds a beef against you, they'll be able to dig up some kind of dirt on you and control the narrative. Hell, even if that narrative is "hey, look at how carefully this guy guards his privacy, he uses the same level of encryption as the drug cartel bosses, he must be up to no good!" I think it's important for you (or perhaps your lawyer, if you're in it deep) to be able to control your own narrative, and that's where the greater transparency comes in.

I don't know if the matters of piracy and intellectual property will be with us that much longer into the future, esp. if we're considering the plight of cybernetic organisms. Already, we're kinda seeing the shift away from licensed reproduction and performances to a clamoring for mindshare.... fading away are the days where the Distributors of Popular Culture had to put earworms into your head by playing crap repetitively on broadcast radio, until you shell out money at them so you can listen to that earworm whenever you want to be reminded of that particular year of your life, like they own a part of your life and culture. Nowadays they're kinda losing the broadcast channel, and have to compete virally for eyeballs with a ton of other half-decent content, in order to deliver you to their advertisers. Or worse yet for them, artists can simply be crowdfunded directly, and paid to produce more of the type of content that people want.

Anyway, I and a ton of other people pirated a ton of content back in the day, back when my entertainment budget was closer to 0 than it is now. I've since been able to just avoid that content that wants to collect royalty fees. If they want to go back though the records and collect for "lost" sales, then sure, I suppose it's fair game, but I'd also expect them to settle for fair compensation and not the exorbitant legal sums they've been requesting. But enough on that digression.

Probably the more impactful "invasions" of privacy we'll be seeing are overlays of stuff that already exists... maybe an overlay that shows you all of the registered sex offenders you meet as you go about your day. There seem to be so many, you'd probably start ignoring it. Or maybe an overlay on your windshield that shows the number of accidents each driver on the highway around you have been involved in recently. You have ratings on restaurants now, how long until restaurants rate their customers so they can decide how much service to bother giving you as you walk in? This is all stuff that's coming, and it'll be kinda foolish to pretend that it isn't or that it can be stopped legislatively. So be prepared to adjust your behavior accordingly.

Oh, well, that's an easy problem to solve, we can just simply round up all the persecutors and... OH SNAP, NOW YOU'VE GOT ME DOING IT!

But really, at what point can we just ignore the busybodies and come skulking out of the closet and be who we want to be and not give a fuck about what what other people think, because they don't have the power to do anything about it.

As far as living by everyone else's rules go, I probably have a good deal of privacy, but I still do it anyways. I don't veg out on video games as much as I'd like to, or pay people to perform sexual acts, even though those things are perfectly legal in places. But people are social creatures who learn from watching others, and naturally try to "fit in" whether their peers are giving them a hard time about it or not. Varying degrees of privacy might make it easier or harder for people to give you shit about stuff, but protection from other people is more of the essential right that should be guaranteed; having some sort of "guaranteed right to privacy" is delusional at best. If someone has some beef with you they'll be able to dig up some dirt.

Hmm, well, I actually came here to make some sort of comment like that... are there no advocates for full transparency?

Increasingly we're living in a world where everything is recorded. Back in the old days you just had to tell everyone that "God is watching" to make them behave. It kinda worked (the Renaissance was pretty much started because bankers were trying to buy their way out of Hell by commissioning works of art for the church). These days with so much privacy, there's not really any incentive to do anything quite like that, and we sort of have an unbalanced arms raced between those who have the money to monitor everyone else and yet guard their own privacy and anonymity.

What if, say in a parallel universe or another planet, there was a society that just simply had full transparency? No pictures of our private parts to worry about, because, well, everyone has them. Everyone shares their browsing history, because, gee, you're into interesting stuff. No need to guard your birthday and SSN because, well, there's actually real cryptographic security keeping people from opening accounts in your name. And if they they did take anything (including the people in power), we'd know who it was and where it went and how to get it back.

I mean, I know this is Slashdot and all, but humor me here.

Heh, yeah, I'm surprised I haven't seen more Ruby yet in this thread, esp. with the proliferation of Chef and gems and rvm and other parts of that ecosystem to keep it puttering along.

For a language that seems to pride itself on its complete OOP-ness, there's so much syntax and different ways of accessing that syntax. I had wondered where all of the PERL masochists had gone...

In my limited experience wrangling with Ruby, it seems very schizophrenic... at once it's supposed to be very clean, yet it's so littered with syntactic sugar. The "best practices" guidelines always seem to be changing, so a common pattern one year will be an anti-pattern the next. There's a little cottage industry of dependency management that has grown up around it, so even as it has become something of a cross-platform glue language like PERL and python, it's such a pain to even maintain consistency among its own minor releases, so we have to use rvm gratuitously to spawn different ruby environments to run different "core" ruby utilities on the same box (chef, foodcritic, rubocop all needing different versions of ruby and libraries and gems, etc.). And it's so slow compared to its peers... for an automation language, I find myself taking a lot of coffee breaks while it goes out and does its thing, and of course that also means all of the code check tools like foodcritic spam me with warnings to do all of the little optimizations like converting my string objects into symbols, so much for the pure object-orientism.

Anyway, I have yet to have an experience with Ruby where it does something that impresses me compared to something else. It seems to be used to write templates for config files a lot, so I suppose that might be its strength. But even there, it seems to be a combination of the worst parts of other languages... all the indeterminate pieces of XSLT, more verbosity than XML, much slower and resource-hungry than other interpreted languages, almost as ugly as PERL, scattered package management in competing and overlapping gems since a lot of the base functionality is somewhat broken ( http://stackoverflow.com/quest... ), and yet seems harder to debug and less accessible too noobs than even compiled languages.

From my experience with Ruby, I'm not exactly sure why this language was developed, other than to provide job security for some devops types. Oh, and I suppose https://github.com/mame/quine-... is cool from an academic standpoint.

http://dl.bukkit.org/dmca/noti....

should be

http://dl.bukkit.org/dmca/noti...

Yeah, one of my roommates did something like this at Cornell U... took all of the core courses while enrolled in the Math & Applied Physics program (in the land-grant Arts & Sciences College), and then transferred to CS in the Engineering College which had much higher tuition. I think this kind of scheme could work well enough even at most other "high end" universities. Plus, the guy ended up with almost twice as many friends/connections (compared to most people... probably 100x compared to me :P )

well, if you're a normal person (and since you're on slashdot, you're probably not), if you search for cars once in a while, you'll start getting car ads everywhere you go on the internet.

When I started testing my employer's website, I started seeing a lot of ads for our/their sites which I never saw anywhere before. I'm not allowed to click on them, since that will cost us money.

Maybe the neatest thing was that I just missed my bus last Thursday, and spent a brief sprint chasing it down a few blocks to the next station unsuccessfully. While waiting for the next bus, I started poking around in my Nexus 5 and some random app popped up a full-screen ad for a taxi service asking "in a hurry?".

OTOH, I was browing Amazon for some wheel covers for my aunt's old car a while ago, and the "what other customers looked at after viewing this item" list had a fleshlight. I stopped shopping for wheel covers.

NPR had some article on how Target targets their ad mailers based on purchase history... They can tell by purchase history when people are expecting, and adjust the ads in their junk mail coupon books accordingly. Some teenager's dad got pissed off at them when they suddenly started mailbombing his family with baby products, and then apologized when he found out a few weeks later that his daughter was pregnant... but Target knew first.

Personally, I like what Google's been doing (and not doing) so far with the data they collect... as a nerd/engineer, a lot it just makes sense. But I'm not as concerned about my privacy as most.

OneBusAway works great for that kind of thing in the Seattle / Puget Sound region. Though I still use Google Maps to provide the best transfer schedule, OBA is then good for tracking if the busses are running on time.

Unfortunately, I found that there are some dead ones where the busses aren't able to check in for a while... So the system might start to assume that a bus is running 15 minutes late, but then the bus will suddenly check in as on time just a few minutes before reaching the stop down the road from me. So. Mrrr

We had a lot of good apps back in the PalmOS days. I used to use JPluckX / Sunrise to download a compressed image of the day's Slashdot using the AvantSlash filter. I could even download the front page of any URLs provided as links, so I could even RTFA or see the AC's goatse links if I wanted to. Plucker for palmos was instantaneous on navigating and loading links from compressed data, much faster than using Avantgo at going back and forth between links, which was in turn much faster than downloading crap from 3g networks at the time over a mobile browser, which was in turn so much faster than trying to use the Slashdot beta AJAX / reactive / adaptive / redaptive interface we have now that doesn't even let you use the "open in new tab" feature that modern mobile browsers have.

I could get virtually all of /. on my device each day, ready to entertain me while I was on the subway or even out camping without cell service. And I couldn't make any comments, so everyone wins.

Yeah, I feel badly for you young'uns, we had things so great back in the day.