YHIHF: The Open Society

Story from my youth: a family friend from Italy married a German lady. Italians tend to be lax about government, Germans punctilious. When time came for the yearly income tax declaration, the man prepared the forms at the very last second, as Italians are wont to do, and gave them to his German wife to submit the morning after.
Curious as she was, the German lady looked at the forms are shouted in disbelief, "Husband, that's not your real income! You make three times as much! You are a government employee, you can't declare to the government that you make less than the government pays you!"
I know what you are all thinking: what the heck was the guy telling his wife how much money he made if he didn't tell the government. But that's not the focus of the story. Instead, the husband looked at the German wife (whose strictness he may or may not have found slightly arousing) and told her, "Wife, if I declare more, then everybody in the tax office is going to ask why this one guy makes three times as much as everybody else in the office!"
It used to be indeed the case that information was something hard to come by. Not any more. Now, the government knows how much you make before you do, and information about you is available everywhere. For those of us that grew up in the past, this is a terrifying notion. In one of my previous jobs, I worked for a company that worried a lot about cyber-security, and I knew very well what kinds of threats there were and how you could exploit things.
This coming generation, though, the Millennials are going for a completely different approach. They are simply ignoring the risks. Sometimes they wake up with a bad headache, sometimes an old photo of their drinking under age, posted on Facebook a decade prior, surfaces to prevent them from getting a job as librarian. But all in all, they seem to be pretty happy the way they live.
Now, the thing is that the approach is not bad at all, not even really that insecure - it's just that you have to go all the way with information. You either keep it close or you open it all up, and the end result is the same. It's just in the netherworld of information openness that problems occur.
What do I mean? Currently, we have two economies that run in parallel and with a few exchange points: cash and electronic. Cash transactions are non-traceable (hence the information content is low). Electronic transactions are traceable. If all exchanges happened electronically, we wouldn't have to ever worry about theft, If something was taken from you, there would be a record of where that money went, who took it, and ways to get it back. It's only when you can turn electronic money into cash that problems arise, because nobody knows where cash goes.
That's not limited to money. Another example: GPS and the laws of the road. A "friend of mine" rode his motorcycle on I-5, from San Diego to San Francisco. Posted speed limit: 65. Minimum speed on the freeway: 90. This "friend of mine" was pretty much forced to drive at everybody's speed, since the freeway was congested and the greatest risk for a motorcycle is being hit from behind.
Now, with GPS in all cell phones, there is certainly the possibility and eventually the certainty that the government (in this case, Highway Patrol) will gain the right to track your speed. What happens then? Will the information be something we hold on to until we are forced to surrender it because of an accident?
Fact is, there is something deeply hypocritical about a law that everybody ignores. Posting a speed limit that is 25 mph lower than the average speed of traffic is a puzzling act. That we acquiesce to it is even more puzzling. We don't care, because it's not enforced.
Imagine what will happen, though, when law enforcement will gain access to your current location and speed: you will be automatically fined whenever you exceed the speed limit, which in current traffic is probably virtually everywhere and at all times, at least on California freeways outside of congested areas.
What about the lady whose drunken photo was found during a routine web search by her prospective employer? What about the man, just diagnosed with cancer, that was dropped by his health insurance because he hadn't declared a wart for which he had been treated? Are those urban myths?
It doesn't really matter: the essence is clear, information can be negative for you. Of course, the opposite is true, as well. Employers that discriminate (like in the case of the "drunken lady") will be noted for their bigotry. Health insurance providers that stiff the customers will be crucified.
Europe, always a little more backwards in time, has declared that it intends to combat information overload by making information private. I understand where Europe comes from, but America has always been an open society, and it's time to open it up even more. Where there have been circumstantial barriers, we should remove them as soon as they become visible.
Once the Highway Patrol notices that 90 mph is the norm on a stretch of highway without causing accidents, the legislature needs to notice. Once it is clear that a particular pattern is used for discriminating behavior, the legislature needs to act.