Exposed

7A Good Solution: Ubiquity of Access

“See me … hear me … feel me.”

– Roger Daltrey, Tommy

The premise, again: privacy is going away. It might go slowly, especially if we take steps to retard its loss; it might go quickly, in just a few years. The loss of privacy will cause enormous damage, as the transition will unveil many things about ourselves to each other (well, actually, it will reveal everything about ourselves). If we act to slow the dissolution of privacy, we're going to cause more damage than the conversion would otherwise include. (See: all the previous chapters, especially Chapter 6.)

I don't mean for this to sound bleak, or hopeless. In fact, I'd like to add a new flavor to the current prevailing conversation regarding the subject—anticipating a post-private world and realizing what it might have to offer. There are numerous benefits we can reap from a world without privacy, and I'm going to explore some of them in this chapter, as well as some (nontechnical) suggestions as to how we might accomplish them.

The nice thing is that we're already recognizing some of the positive benefits we get from trading privacy for value. Many online services are financed with the value of our data instead of money we'd otherwise be charged, which saves each of us the cash. This isn't actually a new model, either, that just occurred in the past few years; this is how newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and other media were financed for more than 100 years—the subscription/cover ...