What Virtue Privacy? By Robin Hanson

• On first glance the homo hypocritus hypothesis, that humans had huge heads to subtly evade social norms while pretending to enforce them, seems supported by our love of privacy. The argument “Why oppose transparency unless you have something to hide
• I pondered Thomas Nagel’s famous ’98 defense of privacy... ………..The point of polite formulae and broad abstentions from expression is to leave a great range of potentially disruptive material unacknowledged and therefore out of play. ... In some cases, perhaps, good manners do their work by making it possible for us to believe that things are not as they are,
• Critica a Nagel...Nagel says privacy norms function to avoid “conflict”, but it seems to me that the conflicts that privacy avoids come mainly from other social norms! For example, if norms require a cheating victim to end their marriage...  a cheating victim who does not want to end her marriage, but who does want to inform her spouse she knows about the cheating, must be careful to send this message in a way observers can’t see. Hence the clever trick with the broken bowl...In Nagel’s other examples, people also conspire to avoid various acts in order to avoid the strong reactions that common norms would require to such acts. Social norms require people to react strongly to publicly visible acts of strong accusation, sexual leering, exposed adultery, or sexual harrassment. Social norms are also the source of our strong reactions to exposed sex, a problem Nagel says the privacy of intimacy helps to solve...
• This all raises the question: If social norms serve the interests of all, then why do we have social norms pushing people to induce the conflicts that privacy norms may then help avoid?
• People were expected to punish norm violators... If such norms had been consistently and fairly enforced, humans wouldn’t have needed huge primate brains. But humans quickly learned how to coordinate behind the scenes to selectively evade social norms,
• Once enough people knew, the norm would have to be enforced, no matter how it was that folks came to know.
• hypocrisy –avoiding the application of norms one endorses to oneself, and yet privacy norms may tend to be helpful in preventing enforcement of excessively strong norms.
• privacy is far –we care about privacy as a high noble social concern, but not as a personal practical matter.
• Friedman
• ipotesi dello scudo impenetrabile
• tesi: il mondo migliore è quello in cui tutti hanno lo scudo
• rapinare una banca è + facile in un mondo senza scudi che con gli scudi
• non è vero che il buono non ha niente da nascondere: non mostrare ciò che potrebbe essergli rubato è un esigenza primaria
• in un mondo libero gli incovenienti della privacy sono controbilanciati dal fatto che l altro può nn credermi e nn chiudere l affare.
• Privacy rights and cognitive bias By Norman Siebrasse
• It seems clear that there is a general presumption in favour of privacy,
• there is a mismatch between the strength of feelings regarding privacy and the strength of the substantive arguments.
• One good policy argument in favour of privacy rights is procedural: it helps prevent arbitrary enforcement of laws by police.
• Another common position is the ‘bad laws’argument... The easy response to this is that the presumption of privacy also reduces enforcement of good laws
• the thinness of the arguments that are most often raised in favour of privacy inclines me to look for an explanation of the privacy presumption based on cognitive biases.
• We’ve all done something wrong that we would like to keep hidden