NEW YORK, NY Oct. 15 (DPI) – Readers of Joe Nocera’s column on privacy in the digital age returned a volley of reasoned replies, most surprisingly free of hand-wringing and most well informed of the trade-offs that a networked people – almost everyone nowadays — must put up with.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/opinion/nocera-a-world-without-privacy.html

Nocera, himself one of the more restrained and informed among NYT columnists, offered up parallels between George Orwell’s “1984” and David Eggers’s new novel “The Circle,” which paints a bleak, dystopian picture of the future of humanity in the digital age.  The book got mixed reviews, but its message – that the surveillance state will soon be running our lives — seems to have resonated with many who fear the corporate-government complex keeping track of our every word, written and spoken.

Readers in turn offered a range of insights – most of them well understanding the tradeoffs that today’s digital age requires of individuals.  Some too dismissed the privacy fears as overblown, but the most recommended posts, somewhat typically, focused on the failure of individuals to stand up to powerful interests that engage in all the monitoring.

(Highest Recommended, 79 Recs) Our problem is not lack of warnings. We were warned about global warming. About running out of oil. About animals becoming extinct. About the dangers of texting while driving.

Our problem is that we don’t want to do anything that might cause us temporary discomfort, even if it saves the planet. Or ourselves. From ourselves.

(42 Recommendations) The invasion of privacy by greedy corporations is the biggest untold story in the world. The corporate invasion of privacy makes the NSA look amateurish. (The only disagreement I have with the column is that we did not need Eric Snowden to tell us anything: we already knew that the NSA read our emails and listened to our telephone conversations.)

Google saying “Don’t be evil” could have come from the Ministry of Truth.

I am going to say something blasphemous: life was better before the internet.

“Privacy is over-rated evolutionarily speaking. Think back to Tribes which is where we spent all our time evolving. You had no privacy. Everything you ever said or did was remembered by everyone else in your tribe.

Privacy has not been a natural state of humanity so calling it a right seems a bit overblown (even though everybody says something is true, that doesn’t make it so).”

Another: “The crucial difference between Orwell’s “1984” fantasy and today’s social media is captured in the word “force” — in “1984” a dictatorship spied on its citizens and controlled their behavior and communications, by force of law. Today’s social media is privately owned and thrives under a democratic gov’t, “with the consent of the governed,” and allows citizens to freely opt in or out.”

Many readers well recognize that perhaps the only way to evade any surveillance nowadays is simply to disconnect:

(26 Recommendations) Want privacy ? Live off the grid. Simple. I know people who do, they are very very happy with life

(Recently added) Privacy is not dead, but it is getting sicker and sicker.