Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow on digital privacy

A very long panel discussion, but well worth watching (or, given the relative lack of visual action, listening to). Charlie gives an excellent potted history of privacy in the first few minutes: this is an artifact of the modern age. That is, until the modern era, there was no privacy as we now understand it. The poor lived cheek-by-jowl in 20-to-a-hovel misery, while the rich lived with 24/7 presence of servants, hangers-on, and other humans. In the same sense that the "nuclear family" is a very recent sociological phenomenon, personal privacy is something we think of as "normal", but it's only become possible in the last hundred years or so.