Data doesn't know what colour you are by looking at you. It only knows what colour you are when you or someone you know specifies that.
For example - your car insurance company doesn't know that you're black... unless you include that on the form. And it doesn't matter. Black people are no more or less prone to having an accident than Hispanics or Chinese or Whites. It's irrelevant for the purpose of car insurance. But insurance companies will ask whatever they can get away with and claim to use it to provide discounts based on statistics. They then often package up this information and sell it to other companies who now know you are black, just because you provided that information when it seemed advantageous to do so. But they will equally use that information against you if they have the opportunity to deny your claim.
I might look at you and know immediately that you're black, but what if I don't know you? What if I've never seen your picture? The only thing I can glean from your data is what data there is to sift through.
So just because something may be visible in person, doesn't make it less important when it comes to privacy.
Even the most innocent of data can be misconstrued and turned against you.
That you live near or socialise with possible terrorists and criminals doesn't make you guilty. I've had very close friends amaze me when I find they're to be divorced as they always seemed a happy couple. I guess friends don't tell me everything. That includes not sharing their plans for terrorism, bank raids and coups.
So McCarthy era paranoia but with an awful lot of data to draw unfair inferences from or perpetuate society's current biases.
Historically speaking governments have always been the worst perpetrators of violence on their own people.
There is much good that can come from registration. It will lead to more responsible gun owners.
However, the argument on the other side of the fence is also true - criminals will always be able to get unfettered access to illegal weapons. However, those weapons will have to be smuggled into the country, not stolen from those who purchased them through legal channels.
But just like the Jews, if you've got a gun and owning a gun becomes a crime that the government decide to enforce retroactively, then you have effectively signed your arrest warrant by registering them.
I don't think this is their intention however. Their intention is merely to hold legal gun owners to a standard of care that I believe they should be held and currently aren't. They're saying "if you own a gun, you're going to be expected to care for it responsibly. If you do not care for it responsibly, you are going to be held accountable for the damage it causes."
But you know what they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The government has a history of making laws that seem to be well intended that end up being exploited because they're overreaching while saying "oh, we don't mean that, we'll never enforce it in that way."
So gun owners shouldn't fear gun registries as a precursor to prosecution?
Yet in the very next sentence you advocate for prosecuting gun owners under a strict liability that holds them responsible for anything that happens using their gun.
>But you know what they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I'd say you've already gone too far when you criminalize someone getting their property stolen.
I also didn't say you shouldn't fear gun registries being a precursor to confiscation. I suggested that the spoken intent is to hold gun owners to a higher standard of care of their weapons. I totally understand that there may be unspoken intent to use it as a precursor to confiscation, and while I don't believe this to be so, you're right to be wary of this. But frankly I think too many gun owners are criminally complacent about ownership and storage of their weapons.
A gun is serious, it should be treated as such. Store it safely and properly, if you don't store it safely and properly and you're caught in that position (i.e. by having it stolen, not reporting it as stolen and used in a crime), then you should be at least be charged for negligence. I don't think there's anything wrong with this - a gun kills. I don't care how you want to spin "guns don't kill people, people kill people," a gun is a weapon that is designed to kill, or at the very least used as a threat to kill. It should always be treated as such.
I don't criminalize people for ownership or having their property stolen. If you can prove it was stored responsibly and your legally approved gun safe was forcefully broken into and your weapon stolen and you reported it as stolen at the time you discovered it, you have absolved yourself of the responsibility of its use in a crime. You have acted responsibly. No charges should be laid against you.
If it was laying around on your night stand and an opportunist kid broke into your house and stole it, loaded and ready to kill, you didn't report it stolen, and it falls into the hands of someone who uses it in a crime, guess what? You're responsible for contributing to that and should be held accountable for your part in that to some appropriate degree. That degree in my mind is at least criminal negligence, in the same way as letting your baby die in the back of a car on a hot day because you forgot about them or getting into a car accident and killing someone because you were texting and not paying attention. What about how bar tenders can be charged for over-serving someone alcohol who then gets into a car and kills someone because they're driving over the legal blood alcohol limit? Your action, or inaction contributed to your weapon being used in a crime. You can argue that if it wasn't your gun, it would've been someone else's all you like. The fact is, it wasn't someone else's, it was yours. If it was someone else's, they would be charged with the same thing you were if they'd acted with the same negligence you did.
If you have a gun, it is your responsibly to store it safely, treat it with the gravity it's warranted. If it is stolen, report it as such. Be a responsible gun owner. If everyone treated their weapons with this amount of care, nobody would be screaming for gun registries.
I have two friends who openly advocate for this method of removing guns from the US. Regardless, I think this is something gun owners fear. When Canada had a registration list, it seized weapons that were legal when purchased and later made illegal by bureaucratic decision, without compensation.
Yes, when people talk about deaths and dangers it's amazing to me that just about every other cause of death is so tiny compared to the numbers our own governments have produced.
On one hand, I think free access to data could be both fascinating and beneficial to the entire human race if used benevolently. But let's face it. History has shown us that any company with access to this data will eventually share it or sell it to someone less scrupulous and it will end up being used against those who gave it freely in the first place thinking that it was either safe or at least couldn't harm them.
I'm looking at you, Cambridge Analytica.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/19/nyregion/newspaper-takes-...
Oh..wait...
Um... you could give me an almost 100% discount and I'm still not giving you the very ammunition that you will use against me at the first opportunity I need to make a claim despite never having made an insurance claim in the last 20 years. Not to mention, I'm not having you watch everywhere I go, when I go, building a profile about where I spend my time, who I spend that time with, when I do that, when I'm home, when I'm not home. You can have the mandatory information I must give you in order to be able to drive my car and take care of people in the event of an accident. Beyond that, I'm not giving you anything.
Freedom is not free, except you just want others to pay, it's the classic argument against government.
The wording of your statement makes a lot of assumptions about the kind of person I am and my level of responsibility towards others without you even knowing me.
Privacy is unfair because it highlights characteristics that are difficult to conceal. If someone wants to discriminate you based on your height, there's not much you can do.
Rather than coming up with strategies to help people hide aspects of themselves, such as lying, we should help people to be more tolerant and understanding. A good start is transparency and openness.
In a world where everyone can hide their differences, failing to do so exposes one to all the discrimination.
But we don't live in an ideal world. The data we freely post out into the world via our social channels is tracked, recorded, cataloged. Our social graphs mined for information about whatever can be gleaned about our personalities and things that matter to us. They say it's to our advantage, because we only receive ads for products that are important to us... but it's really just a means for them to be more specific with their advertising, a way to exploit our information to get access to our wallets. It isn't there for our benefit, though it's sold to us that way.
If you've never seen the movie "The Circle," watch it.
This highlights in very real terms why privacy matters - including your skin colour, sex, sexuality, religion, political affiliation or anything else about yourself. You should be able to divulge your personal information as you see fit, not as a matter of policy.
Why not strive for it?
> The data we freely post out into the world via our social channels is tracked, recorded, cataloged. Our social graphs mined for information about whatever can be gleaned about our personalities and things that matter to us.
That's great, and I'd be happy to pay to ensure more data is collected about me. I'm sure this will become extremely popular in the future. In the meantime, I'm doing it myself (Quantified Self).
> They say it's to our advantage, because we only receive ads for products that are important to us... but it's really just a means for them to be more specific with their advertising, a way to exploit our information to get access to our wallets. It isn't there for our benefit, though it's sold to us that way.
Showing me what I'm looking for is great. I'd pay for that. Do you think Company X is evil for providing services and products that are perfectly compatible with my needs? They get access to my wallet because they do something great and I'm happy to encourage them.
> If you've never seen the movie "The Circle," watch it.
I'm actively trying to make the technology in this movie become reality. However, it wasn't such a great movie, and I disliked the end. Hopefully people realized that the benefits of transparency are well worth the rough adaptation period.
> This highlights in very real terms why privacy matters - including your skin colour, sex, sexuality, religion, political affiliation or anything else about yourself. You should be able to divulge your personal information as you see fit, not as a matter of policy.
What if I see you crossing the street? Am I supposed to keep that for myself? Should we ban surveillance cameras, drones, sensors, GPS trackers, etc? Should people really own any data that intersects with themselves? None of this seems at all reasonable.
Well... the idealistic part of me agrees, why not? I'd love to see a world where everyone treated everyone else without prejudice or malice formed by growing up with the stereotypes we do, but ignorance is still widespread and education lacking. I'd love for a world where our differences were celebrated rather than feared and hated. I'd love for this information to be used benevolently to eradicate disease or to genetically fix hereditary conditions that cause us pain or significantly degrade our quality of life.
They say that everything worth having is on the other side of fear, and I subscribe to this notion. But I fear that humanity in its present form isn't mature enough to adapt quickly enough for many millions of people not to suffer during the interim.
Much good has come in the aftermath of WWII, in fact I would say the good has far outweighed the bad when you consider how far we've come since then. Do I believe that millions of Jews should have died for that progress? No. I don't, and I never will. Do I believe we should have been able to get where we are today without that? Yes, I do. Do I believe we would have? Unfortunately, I do not.
> Showing me what I'm looking for is great. I'd pay for that. Do you think Company X is evil for providing services and products that are perfectly compatible with my needs? They get access to my wallet because they do something great and I'm happy to encourage them.
If they do only what they prescribe on the tin, that's great. Unfortunately, you know as well as I do that this doesn't happen. The data is sold on to other less scrupulous companies and where it can be exploited and used against us in an unregulated fashion. This is why the GDRP and the Data Protection Act came into being in the U.K. and Europe.
> What if I see you crossing the street? Am I supposed to keep that for myself? Should we ban surveillance cameras, drones, sensors, GPS trackers, etc? Should people really own any data that intersects with themselves? None of this seems at all reasonable.
Am I doing anything wrong by crossing the street? What difference does it make if you saw me crossing the street? Are you going to use or release that information to someone to use against me?
I'm from the U.K. so public surveillance is something that I've become used to, and in fact complacent about over the years. When I'm in public, I expect to have my person and my actions on public display. This means I self censor and show people who I want them to see. This doesn't mean you know me. This doesn't mean the world at large knows me. The only things you know about me aside from how I behave are the things I want you to know about me. Just because you want to know something about me, doesn't give you the right to know that information, unless I choose to disclose it to you.
> Privacy is unfair because it highlights characteristics that are difficult to conceal.
The idea that privacy highlights characteristics that are difficult to conceal is possibly truthful, but it's a bit far-fetched, at least when making a case against something (privacy) and alleging that is causes damage (unfairness due to highlighting characteristics...). If privacy is guilty of this crime, then everything is unfair for all sorts of reasons. Some people being tall is unfair because it highlights others' feelings of being short. Some people being more attractive than others is unfair because is causes other people to feel badly about themselves.
None of these "causations" would lead you to believe we should actively try to "equalize" people across all those spectrums, right? That would cause (much) more damage than good. Have you read the Handicapper General? Kurt Vonnegut illustrates this idea.
Therefore, your catchy causation is not a good reason to recommend active destruction of existent privacy.
> Rather than coming up with strategies to help people hide aspects of themselves, such as lying, we should help people to be more tolerant and understanding.
Wow, that's a pretty broad, meta-level prescription there. I have a couple reservations about it:
1. There's no reason to assume it's an either-or game.
Helping people have privacy ("helping people hide aspects of themselves") is not at odds with helping people be tolerant and understanding. In fact, wouldn't "wanting/maintaining privacy" be an example of such a characteristic that distinguishes people, that some people may feel it desirable to conceal due to people being intolerant or not understanding, and that therefore you just recommended people should be more tolerant/understanding of? Or does your proposed implementation of "helping people to be more tolerant and understanding" include an implied whitelist of only certain approved "characteristics" that should be protected this way, and "wanting/maintaining privacy" isn't on the list? I see possible issues with this approach too.
2. Regarding being more tolerant and understanding...
I think it's much easier to treat people this way if you feel more-or-less content in your own life. Otherwise it's easy to let bitterness and resentment steer you into intolerant / non-understanding narratives and mindsets; it's easy to make up stories that justify your bitter feelings about others, and these stories often hinge on assumptions we make against people based on stereotypes or generalizations.
Yet there's no evidence that taking away people's privacy helps them achieve this contentment in their lives. What are examples of places where people have no privacy in their lives? Prisons? North Korea? Where does our idea come from that "total transparency" is guaranteed (or even likely) to unfold in some perfectly equal way that brings fairness, tolerance and understanding?
The internet is already filled with angry people who are sincerely enraged by reading about one another's "unacceptable" differences and experiencing cognitive dissonance about how different other people are; it is too easy for people to enter one another's personal mind spaces, and it's causing intolerance and misunderstanding. So what is your idea - we just do more of it and people will become tolerant and understanding? I don't see any evidence that that's the case.
I don't care about equality of outcome. Heck, I'm not even sure I care about equality of opportunity. All I care about is efficiency, and privacy is inefficient. This is the main reason I despise it.
It also seems obvious that privacy is unsustainable and likely to disappear in the future. Knowing this, we should prepare for it. I don't see many people talking about this.
Certainly not in all cases, maybe not even most? For example, it's efficient to have a private key to log in to your server rather than just leaving it open to get hacked. It's efficient to have a private email inbox so your bank login doesn't get stolen. It's efficient to have a computer you can audit and control the software running on, so that your computer and data don't get compromised. Etc.
Everyone would be screwed without privacy. Being screwed is inefficient. This is the main reason I despise it. For people to move from more secure to less secure systems and paradigms in the name of "total transparency", they would need some assurance that they wouldn't be screwed. And I don't know if making an assurance like that is mathematically possible.
> It also seems obvious that privacy is unsustainable and likely to disappear in the future. Knowing this, we should prepare for it. I don't see many people talking about this.
This may seem obvious to you but I don't see any evidence for it. For one thing, how can you (even approximately) "measure" how much privacy there is? Privacy is by definition what you AREN'T able to see or account for in your ("total transparency") system. So if for example SMSs, IMs, emails and phone calls all become "totally transparent" (i.e. not secure), then we still have no evidence that privacy is "likely to disappear", because, for example, anyone can still just write their ideas in a physical notebook, and we have no idea how much this happens.
The problems you described are authentication problems. It seems obvious that total transparency is the best (and only?) solution to those problems.
There will always be things we don't know. I don't think we'll ever become omniscient. That's fine. What I want is for people to understand how important it is to share and seek knowledge and resources. Tell people how you feel, share your medical records, open source your code, let people use your car. We can't work together if we don't share.
"I'm not doing anything wrong, I have nothing to hide. If you're trying to hide, you must be a criminal."
I pray that nothing you do innocently today becomes public knowledge and retroactively treated as a crime that threatens not only your livelihood, but your very life and the lives of those you hold most dear.
That. That is why privacy should be in our hands. We should be able to choose the information we divulge to the world about ourselves. Not have the world know every last thing about us.
Witch hunts happen. They happen today as often as in the days of the Salem Witch Trials. Black people in the southern States live in an atmosphere of racism, wondering if the cop pulling them over will beat them or kill them... most cops aren't racist. Women everywhere live in an atmosphere of sexism, yet most men aren't sexist misogynists. LGBQT live in an atmosphere of not being accepted and have their lives threatened regularly just because of who they are sexually attracted to. If you don't think you could be on the receiving end of a witch hunt just because your life is "boring", you are as naive as you are ignorant.
Privacy matters. That's why attorney client privilege exists. That's why the 5th Amendment exists. That's why the right to remain silent exists. Just because there is a void in public information about you, doesn't mean it needs to be filled.