Why Do We Care So Much About Privacy?
We care so much about privacy because prior to WWII millions of Jews who were innocently going about their every day business filled out a census that asked them their religion. Their religion was no more illegal than their existence. A few years later they were being exterminated like vermin in an attempt to eradicate them from Europe based entirely on a checkbox on a form. The home address they freely provided sealing their fate.<p><i>&quot;I&#x27;m not doing anything wrong, I have nothing to hide. If you&#x27;re trying to hide, you must be a criminal.&quot;</i><p>I pray that nothing you do innocently today becomes public knowledge and retroactively treated as a crime that threatens not only your livelihood, but your very life and the lives of those you hold most dear.<p>That. <i>That</i> is why privacy should be in <i>our</i> hands. We should be able to choose the information we divulge to the world about ourselves. Not have the world know every last thing about us.<p>Witch hunts happen. They happen today as often as in the days of the Salem Witch Trials. Black people in the southern States live in an atmosphere of racism, wondering if the cop pulling them over will beat them or kill them... most cops aren&#x27;t racist. Women everywhere live in an atmosphere of sexism, yet most men aren&#x27;t sexist misogynists. LGBQT live in an atmosphere of not being accepted and have their lives threatened regularly just because of who they are sexually attracted to. If you don&#x27;t think you could be on the receiving end of a witch hunt just because your life is &quot;boring&quot;, you are as naive as you are ignorant.<p>Privacy matters. That&#x27;s why attorney client privilege exists. That&#x27;s why the 5th Amendment exists. That&#x27;s why the right to remain silent exists. Just because there is a void in public information about you, doesn&#x27;t mean it needs to be filled.