Big Brother, where are you when we need you?

So-called "civilized" human beings have this need for something they call "privacy". It's a peculiar concept for a social animal...especially peculiar since it is not, as many believe, universal.
Primitive societies did pretty much everything in public. Your tipi or wigwam or stone cave didn't have separate bedrooms for parents and children. Nor were "bathrooms" necessarily segregated out of sight. Privacy is in fact an invention of rather recent vintage...and one I'd argue the human race is better off without.
Consider: how many criminal acts are performed in full view of anybody who cares to look?
There are a few, to be sure. Some of them (bank robberies come to mind) are done in public but the perpetrator invariably seeks out some private place to escape to and count his loot. Others (homicide bombings)...well, publicity is the whole purpose of those.
But most crimes happen in private. Rare is the murderer/child molester/rapist who seeks out an audience, either in the planning or the commission of the crime.
The purpose of committing a felony in secret is, of course, to make solving the crime as difficult as possible. If there were some means by which all events could be recorded, no crime would go unsolved and no criminal would remain unapprehended.
Back when I was really young, I toured the police station where my Daddy worked. While there, I was fingerprinted--my inky prints sit in one or another of the musty scrapbooks commemorating every last moment of my young life. This was done on a lark, but somehow I took it in mind that this was something every child had done. Once I found out the crime-solving function of fingerprints, that impression hardened into a certainty: why bother collecting fingerprints if they couldn't be tied to a suspect? It was quite a shock, to say the least, when I found out that ordinarily, only convicted criminals were fingerprinted!
Your kid goes missing. Every parent's nightmare, right? Suppose she had a little GPS transmitter embedded in her skin someplace. We do it for our cars, for Christ's sake. Could it really be true that we care more about cars than we do about our children?

The vast reduction in crime isn't the only benefit of reduced privacy. Much of our not-strictly-illegal-but-certainly-unethical behaviour is due to the anonymous nature of our society. There's a particularly vicious and ironic cycle at work here. Witnessing the rude behaviour of others, we convince ourselves that the world has gone mad, and seal ourselves into our own little coccoons...the better to perpetrate our own acts of rudeness upon others.

Our sense of community has largely been lost. It's been replaced with selfishness and greed as we try to amass the most stuff--which it is now possible to buy in private, through an impersonal computer screen. We consider how much money we make to be none of anybody's business...as if we're ashamed of it, or something. Likewise, businesses stick a price on the goods they sell, and consumers have no way of knowing, in most cases, what the profit margin is.

Let me say this: I have nothing to hide. I remain convinced that only people who do will prattle about their right to privacy.