[rrsmtz]

The point of human rights is to protect the underprivileged - the privileged of any given society don’t need to have these protections because they are at the top of the social hierarchy and get to call the shots. They would simply use their influence to get an exception for themselves. That’s why the US constitution is great, because it’s such a pain in the ass to change (unfortunately the privileged invent “interpretations” to change it retroactively).

Your thought experiment exists in a utopia where the above isn’t the case, which isn’t really applicable to any human society that’s ever existed. The top of the food chain will Until humans stop forming hierarchies, we need rights.

[stagas]

Privacy though is perpetuating that priviledged class because they can do their shady business in secret. If everything was transparent, that would be harder to achieve.

Also the "every human society that's ever existed" isn't true, because for sure when humans were nomads, you basically knew what's happening with everybody in your tribe, transparency was at 100%, privacy at 0. It's also the case today in many places such as small villages where everybody knows what everybody else is doing and it seems to be ok.

[rrsmtz]

It'd be great to expose shady business, but somebody has to enforce the forced transparency and that's a LOT of power. Whoever has that power can pretty easily keep privacy for themselves and their friends, use it to blackmail others, and enforce it more harshly on their enemies.

My point is that no matter what society you look at, the privileged get the nice things (like privacy) automatically whereas the underprivileged have to get it encoded into law, and even then it's not guaranteed. It's a rigged game, and the right to privacy levels the playing field.

When humans were nomads, we didn't have human rights so the point is kind of moot, but we still had secrets (even if gossip made it harder to keep them secret) and we still had a strong social hierarchy with privileged elders.