Freedom from slavery!
Internet!
Progressing ethically as a civilization is nice.
The problem is that surveillance capitalism shares a lot of properties with pollution: the effects are typically hidden or ephemeral; the cost to individuals is low while the cost to society is high; and people have largely become complacent if not resigned to the status quo.
And so a) most people don't understand the sheer extent of surveillance capitalism, and b) they don't understand how they're affected by it.
I can't count the number of times I've seen shocked faces when I explained how companies like Acxiom and Experian work. And they've been around for decades! But they operate in the shadows, out of view, and so people simply do not understand how much of their private lives are bought and sold to the highest bidder.
If they understood that--and I mean truly understood it--I suspect the conversation around these topics would be very different indeed.
Meanwhile, large portions of the tech community have a financial motive to want to downplay these issues. "Oh pfft, privacy, so antiquated," they say as they draw down a 300k FAANG salary funded by the harvesting and selling of private information.
And so what's the predominant narrative? Well, the people who are in the best position to understand these issues have a financial incentive to protect the status quo, while everyone else doesn't understand them well enough to form an opinion, and thus the former dominates the discourse.
Yes, I would argue that controlling information access to property should not be considered a fundamental right - in that it's practically un-enforceable for privacy purposes already; I do think there should be an expectation that you can walk around your property without fear of bumping into some stranger though.
Clearly it's not as cut and dried as that, as physical security is required to ensure that you can have information privacy too, but I think it's important to maintain the distinction.
So you don't think it should be a fundamental right because we lost the right before we realized how important it was?
That's a strange argument.
> I do think there should be an expectation that you can walk around your property without fear of bumping into some stranger though.
Why?
If I walk onto your property and stare in your windows, if "physical security" is important but "privacy" isn't, why should you be allowed to stop me? I'm not threatening you. I'm just watching you. Sounds fine to me.
Or perhaps you'd be fine if I just did it from the public sidewalk with a telephoto lens aimed at your bedroom?
What if I then took a bunch of naked photos of you and your partner and then posted them online? Would you be okay with that? If not, why not, if privacy is not a fundamental right?
How do you propose putting that cat back in the bag?
I also think that if we had legislated for privacy, supposing that we had realised its important early enough, what would that battle look like? I expect it would go as well as the war against drugs; if nothing else miniaturisation makes it practically unenforceable anyway, and legislation might protect you against individual harm but would do nothing against state level, or large corporation, action.
> If I walk onto your property and stare in your windows, if "physical security" is important but "privacy" isn't, why should you be allowed to stop me? I'm not threatening you
Given that we are unable to discern intent prior to action (when that intent is only manifest in thought), strangers lurking are always going to be a different problem to strangers peeking; it's analagous to copyright law vs. property law.
> Or perhaps you'd be fine if I just did it from the public sidewalk with a telephoto lens aimed at your bedroom?
I'm not saying that I'm immune to our societies' privacy hangups; but ideally I should be - I do think we should try and stop judging others for harmless actions.
4th Amendment
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Papers (things containing information), and effects clearly need to be interpreted to INCLUDE digital information storage and devices.
Privacy against corporations can be solved a few ways, but are also piecemeal.
A GDPR like law could definitely help.
Having the FTC ban "free" services would also be a good start, as under terms of bundling free to entrap people.
EULAs can just outright negated, as those onerous documents are effectively an after-sale blackmail. And many of 5hem contain questionable, onerous, or plain illegal terms.
The company aspect will always look for ways to gain money any way they can, so it's always an uphill battle. But we can do some reasonable roadblocks slowing down terrible privacy-destroying behavior piecemeal, and by enforcing laws on the books.
GDPR was a good start.
Creating transparency in data marketplaces, and giving people an affirmative right to have their data removed would be significant progress.
Frankly, I'd like to see the buying and selling of individualized data be made completely illegal, with massive fines for companies that misuse or otherwise fail to protect PII.
> I'm not saying that I'm immune to our societies' privacy hangups; but ideally I should be - I do think we should try and stop judging others for harmless actions.
Jesus, I don't even know how to respond to this. In essence you're saying: If there were no consequences for peoples words or actions we wouldn't need privacy.
Well, yeah.
Except there are, and so we do.
Honestly, I agree with you, but GDPR is barely a start, it does little to actually protect people's privacy. It needs to expand a lot to be an actual weapon against surveillance
That's not the common definition of privacy. Rather, privacy is having the agency to control which parts of your life to share with which other people. It's a freedom of expression: you are free to decide which part of your personality to express at which time.
Having control over who is observing you is a requisite but not sufficient.
Privacy, has grown in importance with the surge of digital communication and mass surveillance.
Regarding privileged communication, it is impossible to define the boundary between what should be private and what should not. Just because some information might seem mundane doesn't mean it lacks potential misuse by bad actors.
By fostering a culture of respect for privacy in our day-to-day lives, we strengthen protections against more significant intrusions.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
Also, what does it mean to free from arbitrary interferrence with privacy? Interferrence implies more than observation, in my view.
So is the word "life" mentioned also once. Do we need to argue also about that? Declarations and constitutions are not supposed to include rigorous definitions. See also:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12...
Privacy in this discussion can mean different things, where there are definite overlaps, but also distinction:
* privacy of action (being sure that no one is watching what I'm doing) * privacy in communication (being sure that my priviliged information isn't compromised)
We should be concerned with the second; the first is already lost
https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
IMO the largest barrier to progress today is that too many people think the point of laws is to dictate ethics. This leads them to believe that legal things are good and illegal things are bad, and then you get horribly circular arguments like those above.
Historical precedents no longer matter, so we as a humanity can again commit all the atrocities of the past? Lunacy.
Sorry to disappoint you: we ("people") should be especially worried about technologists eager to define what is ethical and trying to overcome laws with their own interpretations. No wonder many companies are constantly in courts because of their "ethics".
Besides, the interplay between ethics and law runs through the whole Western philosophy.
Privacy is a human right precisely because of its weight in the question of ethics. I would hazard against playing false-dichotomy games, for they can only be lost, never won. I would say that your error appears to be in giving undue primacy to legal definitions over other kinds as holding some kind of authority. It is true that governments use laws to justify their violent actions but I don't think that gives them any more metaphysical weight over other forms of judgment. (To anticipate a quibble: judgment is inherently metaphysical, to claim metaphysics is irrelevant is to claim opinions are irrelevant and we get nowhere on questions of ethics and rights.)
> Historical precedents no longer matter, so we as a humanity can again commit all the atrocities of the past?
This is such a perversion and misinterpretation of what I said that I'm struggling to see your response as anything but a troll's. Regardless, I will continue.
> we ("people") should be especially worried about technologists eager to define what is ethical and trying to overcome laws with their own interpretations
I agree -- the direction we both seem to be advocating for, then, despite your insistence that we argue about it, is that neither laws nor random technologists can define ethics for the entire society. It must be a bottom-up process of popular, consensual decision-making, as has been demonstrated in the past through mass political (dare I say populist) movements. There is no ethical way for a small group to impose such things on the populace without their input and control in that process.
> the interplay between ethics and law
This is just another variation of the "historical precedent defines ethics" argument, which has already been addressed.
While I have nothing against ethics as such, it is a reality that digital rights have been advanced only through jurisprudence. I am quite disappointed with technology ethics in particular: despite immense amount of research and advocacy within companies and across society, technology ethics have not achieved anything of practical value.
> It must be a bottom-up process of popular, consensual decision-making, as has been demonstrated in the past through mass political (dare I say populist) movements. There is no ethical way for a small group to impose such things on the populace without their input and control in that process.
That is a long characterization for a single word: democracy.
That was my first thought - like, it would great if everybody agreed that it was a fundamental right, but other than as an empty political talking point, I'm not familiar with any government official in all of recorded history who's ever behaved as if they thought so. It's definitely not codified in any law I've ever seen.
Human rights are not intrinsic to human beings: they're fundamental to our civilization. I for one look forward to the expansion of fundamental human rights.
BTW, 'Define "X"' sounds rather childish, whoever says it.
I'll take it! Wait a second while I get my leather jacket & shades
... imposing their singular viewpoints ...
I missed the bit where I imposed anything on anyone, but as you prefer. By the way, how do you have a non-singular viewpoint?
Yeah right. You could walk any street, and people would not have known which street you walked before that. You could have your picture taken, and no one who saw your photo could know your name nor your birth date. You could enter a shop, and none of the shopkeepers would know which shop you went to before -- most shopkeepers wouldn't even remember what you bought a week before, unless maybe you were a regular. How can you say that privacy was rare, when it was the natural state of being before mass-scale administration and surveillance was possible?
Privacy for the general public has always been considered a danger, and wasn't even a concern for the courts until technological advances removed any limits on how much even uninteresting people can be surveilled, and how easily massive amounts of that data can be kept and algorithmically searched through. But even in the old days, the government would find time to go through your mail to see if you were getting any information about birth control, then arrest you for it.
I wonder how people can watch old spy movies now, where spies had to smuggle money to other spies, they communicated with tiny strips of microfilm surreptitiously dropped into trashcans, etc., if they think that in the past, people could communicate freely with each other and transfer money willy-nilly? The battle that snoops are involved in now is the same as always, except with extremely overpowered tools and access. This access will not be limited, and these tools will not be dropped, because these tools can be turned on any politician who seriously wants to do that.
The way they see it is the same way they saw the made-up "missile gap." They look at China, and its government powers over civil liberties, and see it as an arms race that they're losing. If you're anti-surveillance, they see you as holding back the West in comparison, and wonder why you would want the bad guys to have access to tools that the good guys don't have. So they not only want more surveillance, they want to use it to track the people who are against more surveillance.
This is another self-serving narrative that motivates western elites to exaggerate the capabilities and immorality of US enemies, just like the missile gap was.
There is a similiar meaning of "rights" as a word used to descibe what people are able to do. The fact that I have legs gives me the right to walk, for example. Within this idea, there is a further idea of natural rights, which descibes what the rights (that is, abilities,) of people in nature — or more aptly, people not in civilized society — have, which I think is what you are refering to. There are people who believe in human rights that use natural rights to discover human rights but it is not necessary to do so. A more popular definition of human rights is what the people decide or what people who study human rights decide.
Realizing that rights are not real, that is, something that you "have" or are born with, is important if you want to truly understand them.
These days there can be no such expectation, and we need to separate out discussion of day-to-day privacy from "if bad actors intercept my communication bad things happen".
We should aggressively maintain the security of privilaged communication, and not stress so much about day to day privacy in our lives; stop gossiping and judging others for actions that do not harm others, whilst allowing them necessary privacy for transactions that should remain privilaged.