Ask Lemmy

Privacy is a fundamental right that protects autonomy, personal dignity, and the freedom to engage with society without fear of judgment or control. It acts as a crucial safeguard against authoritarianism. Without it, every choice we make can be monitored, recorded, and scrutinized by those in power. History shows that surveillance is often used not to protect people, but to label harmless behaviors as suspicious or deviant, creating pretexts for further erosion of rights.

But beyond its role in protecting civil liberties, privacy is essential for personal growth and mental well-being. We all need space to be ourselves, to practice new skills without perfection, explore interests that might seem uncool or immature, enjoy “guilty pleasure” media, or simply act silly, without worrying about how it will be perceived or used against us. These moments aren’t trivial. They’re where creativity, healing, and self-discovery happen. Privacy gives us room to evolve, to make mistakes, and to be human

What’s your credit card number? I am curious.

Do you have children? What are their names and where do they go to school when you are not watching over them? again I am curious.

What do you care for deeply and value most? Is it your family, a friend? Who are they and what would you do to avoid them from any pain, again I am curious.

What is your daily routine? When can I expect to see you in a specific location and when will you be away from your possessions in your home? What kind of security do you have on your physical space and digital space? I am curious.

What kinds of things do you like and not like? What would you do if I could provide you the things that you favour? Or what of if I subtly introduced those things that you dislike purposefully? I am curious.

What do you get paid at your work? What if I was negotiating my salary and seeking a promotion above you, what if I made more than you and did less?

What do you make of generative AI? And what if I had your likeness passed on to a model to mimic your look, your sound, your appearance and mannerisms and opinions? What if I made you say or do or support something that you don’t stand for? What then?

What if you made a living off something and you only received payment once you had presented this thing to the client or intended audience, what if you showed me what this was before you did this and got paid? Would that bother you? Would that affect your income at all?

The human condition is not one of a utopia, mind your own business as best you can but don’t expect that everyone has been given an equal footing in this world. For your sake and the sake of others, privacy is a matter of respect at a micro, macro and global scale and beyond that it has implications to intellectual property, the ability for a single person or a nation to maintain resources and income, and allow at the most basic level a person to have a conversation with themselves or with god and be truely vulnerable without any judgement whatsoever.

Because knowledge is power and most people don’t like giving whomever power over them for no reason. Also, it shouldn’t matter why privacy is important to people, the fact that it is should suffice to protect it.

None of your goddamn business.

Because it's not the first 99 people that know all about you that are the problem, it's the 1 in a 100 who are out to grief or scam or steal or coerce.

People love to share about themselves, and that's fine... unless there's a malicious actor prompting them to overshare.

People love to gossip about each other, and that's usually tolerable... until rumor is weaponized.

Why is privacy important? Be specific.

That's how I prompt AI, not how I would address [a community of] people. But that's just me, I guess.

Because people will abuse information about you that they find out.

"Privacy" in the modern sense is less about protecting you from personal embarrassment or financial loss, and more about protecting society from the dangers of mass data collection.

Historical examples of mass datasets that were misused:

• The Nazis used demographic records (birth, death, marriage records, etc.) to identify Jews and other undesirables in conquered countries.
• Japanese Americans were identified for internment in part through illegal use of census information.
• The Rwanda genocide was facilitated by tribal information being printed on drivers licenses.

In none of these examples were the data collected for the evil purposes it was eventually used for. In some cases, the evil purposes were completely forbidden by the rules governing the data, but they were used anyway.

Information is a form of knowledge. Knowledge is power. And power in the wrong hands is dangerous.

Because I don't trust you and shouldn't have to.

First, because it protects otherwise vulnerable groups of people who fight for freedom and justice. Whistleblowers, journalists, independent intelligence groups need privacy to uncover the crime and abuse of the powerful without fearing repercussions.

Second, because being watched forcibly changes people's behavior. People are forced to be "normal", they do not allow themselves the same liberties they have when they're in private. When this becomes default, it negatively affects mental health, inducing severe stress and anxiety.

Third, because there are cultural conventions at the backbone of our society and the way it functions that are trampled by the invasion of privacy. You are taught to be uncomfortable when naked around others, to close off when you go to the toilet, to talk through your deeply personal or intimate matters exclusively with a select few etc. This isn't merely an isolated cultural quirk - it defines how we treat each other, how we communicate, how our sexuality and reproduction function (and who gets reproduced to begin with), how our relationships work, what kind of language we use, and more. Letting anyone or anything in just like that naturally makes many uncomfortable, and has the potential to be ultimately disastrous for the society we know - a kind of society built with expectation of privacy as one of its cornerstones.

Fourth, because the main groups that are interested in private information are governments (see the first point), those willing to manipulate you into buying something, denying your autonomy in the name of profit off your back, and those willing to manipulate your opinions, mainly political, to serve their interests.

Fifth, because private information is not always adequately safeguarded. Leaks can provide sensitive information used in fraud, blackmail, and by other malevolent actors.

Because I'm happy when I have privacy and unhappy when I don't.

Privacy is important because nobody likes or wants to be targeted.

there are things you want to protect in order to protect yourself.

for example: would you give me, a stranger, your social security number (if youre american) and banking info?

Because it's not you who decides you have something to hide, which means it can change on a whim. Current example: the situation in the USA.

Privacy affects a number of things, so it's hard to give any broad answer, but here's a few individual examples I guess.

• You close the door when you use the bathroom. We are simply uncomfortable with being perceived in a vulnerable situation like that by other people in most circumstances. To get rid of privacy would be to get rid of your bathroom door, and make yourself uncomfortable when you simply don't have to be.
• You store your passwords and don't share them with anyone. To give up privacy would be to give up all the access to your private accounts.
• You might not state exactly how much money you have when you're in public. Without privacy, people with a lot to lose would suddenly be easily identifiable targets for bad actors that could kidnap them, extort them for ransom, etc.
• Online search habits can identify things about you. A lack of privacy means targeted advertisements can convince you to buy things you wouldn't waste your money on otherwise, (cough cough instagram showing teen girls beauty ads specifically when it detected they were feeling insecure), or that governments and corporations can influence your decisions and opinions away from your best interests (cough cough Cambridge Analytica scandal)
• Being open isn't always beneficial. You might lie to a child about where puppies go when they die, because making that currently private information public to the child would only make the situation harder for them.
• Harassment relies on identifiable information about you. If you had to publish your name, address, phone number, and email with every account you made because privacy didn't exist, any statement someone dislikes could lead to major problems for you. This means self-censorship, and constantly living in fear if your ideas exist outside someone else's acceptable worldview who happens to also be willing to cause you harm.

Obviously these are just a few examples, and there are ways in which a lack of privacy can also be beneficial. For example on my harassment point, you could also argue it's bad that neo-nazis have anonymity, because it makes it hard to stop their dangerous rhetoric, but that could again be countered by saying neo-nazis are much more likely to harass and threaten people, who themselves then need privacy.

It's a similar argument to free speech. It might not be good for everyone in all cases, but limiting free speech (or in this case, not having or limiting privacy) would lead to oppressive ideologies gaining power faster than non-oppressive ones, would dull human expression and make things more monolithic, and generally make any form of democratic or outside-the-norm expression extremely difficult if not impossible, so we accept the potential downsides in favor of the much larger upsides.

I don't believe that privacy is necessarily important per se. Rather, I believe that it's a foundational violated right.

Rights are (not coincidentally IMO) almost always conceived and expressed backwards. That puts the onus on those who would defend a claimed right. I think the onus rather obviously should fall on those who would violate a right - they are the ones who are acting in a specific way, so they are the ones who need to justify their actions.

If an individual lives in complete isolation, they have a complete and total and unchallenged "right" to privacy - it's literally impossible for anyone else to breach their privacy. It's only with the addition of other people that the matter becomes relevant, and only with an attempt by another to breach their privacy that it becomes a point of contention.

So again, and really rather obviously, that other has to be able to justify their breach of privacy, since it's specifically them and their actions that have made the issue relevant.

And at that point, it's really a very simple question - who has a greater right to control over the details of an individual's life - that individual or some third party?

So it's not so much that I believe that people have a right to privacy as that I believe that people cannot possibly have a right to violate someone else's privacy.

Because there are people out there that are intent on using certain information to harm you in one way or another.

Because the more a stranger knows about you the more tempted they are to use that information against you - even if their intentions are pure at first.

Do you really need to ask this question with LLMs around? We had big data for several decades and when it emerged, nobody gave a fuck about privacy cause of "who would even want to look at me specifically?".

Now we get to the point where everyone can be analysed via AI. All the types of questions could be answered almost automatically:

• What do I need to say to this group of people to be elected?
• List all vulnerabilities of person X.
• List all the people that look like they have money and not enough connections to protect themselves.

Etc etc.

Gifting your data to tech fash corpos is a form of suicide.

Basically anything you say or do can and will potentially be held against you in the court of public opinion if an AI bot finds it.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/technology-uk/article/my-internet-troll-turned-out-to-be-an-ai-bot-gone-rogue-qzr7w8qf0

The more information you give, the more they have to use against you.

How to manipulate you, how to trick you, etc.

Also if you’re exposed as a certain type of person (gay/trans/brown/black/etc) are being targeted in some countries.

If your exposed showing knowledge in some subjects then they could target you. Example is how they are targeting some news reporters for reporting the truth.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-social-media.html

A lot of good answers in here here’s one more

The more data companies have about you the more they can arbitrarily charge you more.

For example, they realize that those people who listen to heavy metal and talk to themselves are more likely to get into a car wreck.(Please understand this is a made up example). So because Someone can use your car and your phone to listen to you, And they can also figure out your music habits. Now they realize they can just charge you more for insurance. Yet the reality is you may have never had a car accident in your entire life. So why are you getting charged more for insurance?

Now this is just one example, but I think you can understand why your privacy is very important.

Also talk to any attorney they will tell you even a halfway decent attorney can get a watermelon convicted of murder. So you’re right to privacy in your own home and you’re right privacy for your phone you write privacy in general is very important. Because evidence could be made to say pretty much anything you want .actually that falls under unreasonable search and seizure and privacy, but you still get the idea. Privacy is very important

Personal reasons.

Knowledge is power. Give all knowledge to a company, you also give them total power.

Look, you want specifics but didn't provide any. That's basically manipulative. It suggests you don't want a real answer, but you want to say you tried to find one.

In terms of tech, it's because what data you think they have on you is only a tiny fraction of what they actually have. I'm a backend developer who's worked on numerous web services and you'd be blown away by the amount of data companies collect. Think: full scanable replays of your browser session when visiting websites. At my previous job I could see literally every bit of identifiable data available for each user and could replay their browsing as an interactive video.

It's a massive invasion of privacy

Well keeps people from coming to my house and harassing me simple because my politics are different. There's that.

Government could entrap me based on data they get from me, or I could be deceived or be part of a targeted propaganda. Like I could see the propaganda but with the data they get it could be tailored it so that it's more convincing to me.

Also just having privacy avoids scrutiny. Maybe I just want to watch an anime and not have it part of a recommendation algorithm or ads if I didn't block them.

I simply don't like the thought of big tech knowing intimate details about me, my health, finances etc. I think it's better regulated in the EU, but I am under the impression that in the US this kind of data could be sold to your health insurance, car insurance etc, affecting the payments. I.e.: Your super smart car detects that you drive fast. This data is sold to your car insurance and they raise your monthly payment.

Then in a state with strong ideology you may be ostracized for your activity deemed wrong or treasonous. And then there are services demanding biometrics or a passport to register you. No. Just no. I am not putting these in a data-bank I have 0 control over and is a fat jackpot to malicious hackers. if it was my own and it got hacked I'd at least know that it was my own fault :D

That's none of your god damn business, and I'd thank you to stay the hell out of my affairs.

Why do you think its not important?

Do you want all your personal messages publicly visible? Do you want people to know what you're doing every second you access the internet?

To answer your question... Do you close the door when you take a shit ?