In the telepath society, is there a "polite" subculture where people don't look at each other's thoughts unless they're explicitly marked public (as a subcultural norm) ? If so I probably would opt in. I might opt in anyway, but I'm not sure.
I would probably opt in to a society where one could optionally publish verified, authenticated, non-repudiatable thoughts and/or feelings.
(In shminux's further specified "mandatory write / voluntary read Facebook stream" model, access to your thoughts would be effectively logged, because the accesses would appear in the accessor's stream. I presume that you could also be alerted to people accessing your stream.)
My model is indeed "mandatory write / voluntary read", possibly with optional reading alert. As for this "polite subculture", given that "impolite" people cannot be forced to follow the public/private tag, I don't know how likely this could emerge. Possible, of course, in the same way that passers by in large cities or passengers in a public elevator don't meet each other's eyes. But this habit arises from some basic level of privacy, which simply does not exist to begin with among telepaths.
I asked this question on IRC before and got some surprising answers.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, you get cryo-preserved and eventually wake up as an upload. Maybe meat->sim transfer ends up being much easier than sim->meat or meat->meat, or something. Further suppose that you are not particularly averse to a digital-only existence, at least not enough to specifically prohibit reviving you if this is the only option. Yet further suppose that sim-you is identical to meat-you for all purposes that meat-you cared about (including all your hidden desires and character faults). Let's also preemptively assume that any other attempts to fight this hypothetical have been satisfactorily resolved, just to get this out of the way.
Now, in the "real world", or at least in the simulation level we are at, there is no evidence that telepathy of any kind exists or is even possible. However, in the sim-world there is no technological reason it cannot be implemented in some way, for just thoughts, or just feelings, or both. There is a lot to be said for having this kind of connection between people (or sims). It gets rid of or marginalizes deception, status games, mis-communication-based biases and fallacies. On the other hand, your privacy disappears completely and so do any advantages over others the meat-you might want to retain in the digital world. And what you perceive as your faults are out there for everyone to see and feel.
As a new upload, you are informed that many "people" decided to get integrated into the telepathic society and appear to be happy about it, with few, if any, defections. There is also the group of those who opted out, and it looks basically like your "normal" mundane human society. There is only a limited and strictly monitored interaction between the two worlds to prevent exploitation/manipulation.
Would you choose to get fully integrated or stay as human-like as possible? Feel free to suggest any other alternative (suicide, start a partially integrated society, etc.).
P.S. This topic has been rather extensively covered in science fiction, but I could not find a quality online discussion anywhere.