State privacy

I had an interesting idea today. There's been a constant back-and-forth in recent years about the balance of privacy protections in the face of both government and corporate desires for increasing levels of access to peoples' data. Often the problem comes down to, well, exactly how much privacy do you need anyway? The "if you have nothing to hide" argument is a way of saying that you don't really need any privacy, which should be transparently false. But conversely it's hard to argue that there is no possible end that could justify an invasion of privacy. If there's some sensible middle ground, where is it?

My idea is this: we already have a notion of state privacy, usually called state secrets or classified information. So let's start there. Given the vast and disproportionate power of a state compared to an individual, you might think that we would have stronger protections in the interests of balance. In fact, the opposite is the case. It's possible (these days, commonplace) for the US government to completely remove information that would violate its privacy from court cases. And outside a courtroom, revealing its private information is punishable by death.

It would be interesting to see what a world would look like where we could label our own secrets as classified information, with accompanying legal protection. A world where we could legally prevent that information from appearing in court cases against us because it would be harmful to our relationships, hurt our business opportunities, or compromise our physical safety. And we could sentence people to death or a lifetime in prison for revealing our secrets without our permission, even if the secret was that we acted immorally or broke the law.

That'd be quite a world to see, though I definitely wouldn't want to live there.