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I have heard more than once from friends around me that they are willing to give up their privacy if it can make life more convenient and safer. Every time, I am shocked and curious: why has privacy become so cheap in our cultural system? Don’t they have secrets that need protection? Is everyone so open and aboveboard that they are willing to let every secret of theirs be known to outsiders?

Measures for the Administration of National Online Identity Authentication Public Services (Draft for Comment) was officially released on July 26 to solicit public opinions.

Professor Lao Dongyan stated that this is similar to "health codes during the pandemic; the governance approach is exactly the same, except that the social control through health codes has been made daily and normalized."

This means that every webpage you have visited, every comment you have made, and every trace you have left can be traced. This is terrifying because there are some contents I usually browse that I don’t want others to see, even if those contents are unproblematic. Because I think this is part of my private personal life. If others can know what I have read, it feels like my bedroom is wide open, turned into a zoo, where I can be watched at will.

This seemingly makes social governance more convenient, but running "naked" on a transparent Internet will probably make the Internet lose its due significance. It is precisely because of the existence of virtual space that many people are willing to post things they are unwilling to say in public life and browse the information they want.

If every subtle clue is controlled through data supervision, will people still dare to randomly browse things or speak freely online? In other words, what counts as "random browsing," and what kind of speech is considered "random speech"?

I recall that Professor Li Zhi from Peking University, opposing the gate guard system of Peking University, refused to enter by scanning his face at the gate and instead climbed over the barrier, racing with the security guards.

Li Zhi was concerned about freedom and privacy, because "free access to universities is natural and rightful." Setting up artificial obstacles in the name of security may seem to make universities safer, but it also castrates the most important spirit of freedom in universities.

Moreover, the gate face-scanning technology comes at the cost of individuals giving up their freedom of portrait.

For those who care about individual privacy, perhaps we should also, like Professor Li Zhi, "climb over" the online IDs and online certificates.

Only when we ourselves consider privacy important will system designers be more humane when considering issues such as security and management. If we ourselves don’t take privacy seriously, then why not directly use big data technology? Social management would become a puppet show, and I believe this is not the form we want to see.

For the management of cyberspace, the difficulty has never been technology, but social ethics. Technically, achieving the effects of online IDs and online certificates could have been realized long ago. The problem is that once it is widely applied and becomes a social consensus, many subsequent troubles will arise. Once we give up this privacy, we will not feel distressed when giving up any future privacy.

Hackers are a problem.

But a more potential problem is that once everything is transparent, those privatized spiritual lives will be even less valued. People live in the sunlight, with no place for shadows to hide. Yet a large part of our personality is precisely in the shadows. Protecting one's own secrets is actually protecting one's own dignity. If you don’t take yourself seriously, I suppose giving it up is okay. But those who still value individual spiritual life should strive to become masters of "hurdling," just like Truman escaping (from The Truman Show).

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This article is translated from:https://c.m.163.com/news/a/J8BNUPA905567FJK.html

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