Is privacy dead?

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How does everyone else regard privacy? Do you tend to be a private person, or completely open about everything, with everyone? Are there areas of life you don't mind exposure in, but keep others personal? In a world like today's, where surveillance is everywhere and people seem to think it normal to post even the most intimate details of their lives on Facebook/social media, is it even possible to have any personal privacy anymore? How do you regard the system becoming more connected and centralised, so all information is viewable? Is the information you are required to give up for services, employment, housing, medical treatments, etc too invasive? Should outside parties be entitled to this level of personal information? Should it be able to be destroyed at the person's request, as it is their information? Do you dislike records being kept on everything you do, or not care?
I'll admit to being a bit extreme on this. I'm very private about most things, and will actively avoid giving up information or submitting to system centralisation (refused to get one of those electronic cards for the bus/train that records everywhere you go, the date, time, how much you paid, etc because it jumped up and down on my paranoia button). I'll likely end up living in the woods wearing a tin hat.
But even in everyday life, it seems privacy is old-fashioned. At the moment I can hear someone standing outside having a loud and uncomfortably personal phone conversation with his daughter, when he could do this inside, quietly, in private. A few days ago two of the women were discussing one of their new boyfriend's dick so loud I could hear it from the second floor. Another person published every detail of their breakup on Facebook and wrote a whole chapter on it on an online autobiography blog. I had a nasty encounter trying to get a new phone contract where they wanted details about my credit status, employment, and how long I had been living at my current address I wasn't willing to give them just for a phone.
Do you believe there is a way to exist without this constant exposure? I'd sure like to hear about one.

Paying for everything in cash is a good start. Wearing a wide-brimmed hat and keeping my head down in public places is another. Abstaining from Wi-Fi and using only hardline connections is a third. Never put any personal data on a device that can connect to the Internet ... the list goes on ...

Never take for granted that anything you say or do with a friend is not being monitored by someone else.

Even worse our right to a trial is dead!! ! You can be put in prison for decades and never be charged with anything!! !

I've been at workplaces that use employees social media pages as means of discipline and mockery. This was something that took place unilaterally between employees.

People are getting fired for saying things that were un-pc, that were overheard from private conversations between friends in their spare time.

I don't have a lot of tolerance for this.

You know the standard reply: if you don’t have anything to hide, you don’t need privacy

Well, they want face-recognition for public security cameras.

But I bet it's just a matter of time before you hold your phone at somebody's face, and can see all their life history, facebook, job, popularity, virgin: yes/no, last time taken a dump in public bathrooms...

^ We will no longer be people, we will be identified by our data.

I don't feel privacy is "dead," per se.

Though, through technology, our overall privacy level is less than it was before the mass proliferation Internet during the mid-late 1990s.

Privacy might not be dead, but it is shell of what it was both in reality and in people's attitudes. The idea that if you have nothing to hide why care existed, but did not become widely accepted until 9/11.

Privacy was king when I was growing up in the 1960's. That attitude had its bad sides. If you heard screaming at your nieghbors and you reported it was you who would be shunned because the attitude was what went inside somebodys home was strictly thier business. But overall it was good thing. Every mistake you made did not get recorded where it can be used against you the rest of your life and beyond. That allowed people to less afraid to make mistakes, freeing them to try more things. This helped people define themselves and grow as people. Constant anxiety about doing or saying the wrong thing can't be good.

On a civil society level, eroding privacy isn't so bad. We can express our kinks and they can get just drowned in the vastness of other people's kinks. You know how everyone's a little weird? - well, only now, we actually know. I mean, only a few years ago homosexuals were incarcerated or institutionalized- now we know it's a norm-variation.

Some of our normative structures are a bit behind, though. The workplace experience described above is aclear example of one of the downsides.

And finally: as long as our governments are working against us, loss of privacy means more surveillance, and more exploitation by marketing.

We ahould turn the argument around then:

If the governments don't care about us as individuals, why all the surveillance?

Imight have things to hide - not from my fellow citizens, but from my government!

I value privacy highly. I even attempt to protect what little privacy I have left. Unfortunately, I lived much of my life from age 20 years through the present in a kind of fishbowl. Apart from WrongPlanet.net, I don't use social media.

Privacy is more 'dead' than people seem to realise. For example, how many people realise that every search anyone has ever made on any search engine is permanently stored and user-identified? It is more cost-effective for authorities to accumulate and store this kind of information indefinitely than delete it. I think people ignore the risks to themselves. Imagine if that access to information had been available in the presidency of Richard Nixon, and how it would have been used. Nothing prevents this from happening in the future.

People who assert that the invasion of personal privacy is a good thing don't tend to remove curtains or blinds from their homes (I note!) and it seems that privacy is most valued when it has already been irreparably harmed.

PS: I use Ghostery to keep track of the trackers who track what I (and you lot) are browsing, and to block them from silently tracking any click I make on any website. You can download it for free and it is simple to install.