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Why is privacy important? Be specific.
(lazysoci.al)
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this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
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Ok. A counterargument.
Information wants to be free. And to let it flow freely is the least-effort solution.
By letting information flow freely we approach a state where everybody knows everything about everything and everybody. This could be pretty great and seems the easy and natural way to go. A kind of superdemocracy. By inhibiting this evolution we create a state of deformity and disease.
Information doesn't "want" anything, you're personifying a concept.
It's a figure of speech.
It means that information propagates extremely easily.
Sounds like you've just answered your question about why privacy is important.
I agree: knowledge should be free. But that doesn’t mean all information, especially private lives and deeply personal details, should be universally accessible.
People aren’t data packets. The idea that “everyone should know everything about everyone” assumes superhuman recall and universal comfort with exposure, neither of which exist. If we’re talking sci-fi (like the Borg), total transparency works for them because individuality and autonomy is erased. But that doesn't work for people as we currently exist.
Here’s the key: privacy doesn’t hinder open information, it enables it. Encryption, VPNs, private browsing, these tools protect your ability to seek and share freely, without fear of surveillance or retaliation. Without privacy, power chills dissent. People stop asking questions.
So yes, free knowledge matters. But personal lives aren’t public records.
Privacy isn’t the enemy of openness.
It’s its best defense.
Edit: Reworked this to streamline my point. Some of the phrasing no longer matches the quotes you used in your response, the the general points remain the same.
I see it more as a physical fact. Keeping a secret takes more effort than open communication. Information propagates like a fart.
Well that would be google. You don't need to carry the information around with you, you just need to know how to craft the right query.
It might just be the taboo of the hour too.
That's a stretch
That's a big stretch. Literally "inhibiting the flow increases the flow". I mean I see your argument. But the constraining force here isn't free information, it's judgement and persecution.
Mine wasn't an argument of moral imperative but physics. And fighting physics is exhausting.
Edit: I wrote a long rebuttal last night. Wasn’t sober. Woke up, read it, and thought: Ain’t nobody got time for that.
So instead, just the core point:
It’s not a stretch to say privacy protects both our legal rights and our willingness to access and share information.
It is a stretch to claim that not recording and uploading everything I do in private will cause a “state of deformity and disease.”
That’s not physics. That's selling data collection as snake oil. It's an attempt to justify a world view without examining it's ramifications.