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Kafka vs. Orwell: Metaphors About Electronic Privacy
Eric_Grimm writes "Carl Kaplan of the New York Times has done an interesting story on a draft law review article (click the "download paper" icon for a PDF version)
relating to the metaphors that should be employed to assist legislators in understanding the personal data protection or "electronic privacy" debate currently raging in Congress and state legislatures. Both Kaplan's story and the law review article are well worth a read."
http://partners.nytimes.com/2001/02/02/technology/ 02CYBERLAW.html
Now, not only do they know that you're a dog, but they know what breed you are, what kind of dog food you eat, and what brand of chew toys you like.
I guess that's what they call progress nowadays.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Personally, I would think maybe something like "Brazil" would be better, but it has been so long since I have seen the movie. As I recall, the movie is so wild that it might be utterly incomprehensible to the very lawyers that we would want to educate.
So I wonder what would be a better illustration. Maybe something by one of the existentialists?
gack, it is late, and my mind has turned to mush.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
privacy is a particularly complex issue. as i try to teach my students, it's a subject we only began to talk about when it began to disappear. as such, it's a name for a thing that doesn't exist -- or the wrong name for something new that does now exist. the trick comes in specifying what exactly that thing is and is not -- and, in that regard, i think it's reasonable to say that metaphors are ultimately counterproductive, because they try to describe something new in terms of the old.
but eric grimm is a very, very thoughtful person, and i hope that these remarks might serve to build on what he has written, rather than to tear it down.
This is an interesting article, but the question I have after reading it is this: why use a metaphor at all?
I remember hearing about a study in one of my political science classes where a number of students were given a problem that involved a country that was a threat to the United States because it had interests in spreading its boarders. There were two sets of students dealing with the same problem. The only difference between the two sets was that one set had a problem that used names that sounded similar to the names of Cities and politicians involved in Cuba in the 1960's and the other related to the Cities and politicians that were related to Nuremburg in the early 1940's. You can probably guess how it turned out but suffice to say, the students saw the connections--whether consciously or not--and settled on a plan of attack that would defend against either the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Nazi regime.
The point I'm trying to make is using metaphors to explain complex situations will always imply facts that are not necessarily true when carried from one situation to the next, and their use is, for the most part, inherently misleading. This situation needs to be looked at as an example of its own, as it surely will be when it is used as a metaphor for the next paradigm shift 40 years from now.
-- PhatKat
Ever read Mark Turner's The Literary Mind? Run, don't walk, find a copy, struggle through it, and then come back and reread what you just wrote.
There's a big difference between metaphors and parallelisms (in a literary sense), whether or not those parallelisms are being done with direct metaphors, or similes, catachresis, whatever. A lot of metaphors you simply cannot and should not get away from (see Ortony as well). Your example doesn't wash, because what you're describing is a parallelism, not a metaphor. My handy Holman and Harmon Handbook To Literature says that a metaphor is "an analogy identifying one object with another and ascribing to the first object one or more qualities of the second." Metaphors therefore don't necessarily "imply facts that are not necessarily true when carried from one situation to the next," because with many metaphors, there's simply not enough area of congruency to make workable more points of comparison than the stated or obvious. Many metaphors (such as "the leg of a table" or "the keystone of an argument") don't imply much in the way of facts at all, really. And metaphors are not necessarily "inherently misleading," because, if you know anything about metaphors, you know that you just can't get away from them. Even the term "misleading" is, dare I say, a metaphor. Only bad metaphors are misleading (and then not always), and that's exactly what the paper is trying to correct.
Metaphors do provide a useful and necessary way for human beings to assimilate information -- mainly by symbolically linking the unknown to the known. Therefore we can shorten the learning curve for those not "in the know" about these complex issues (like computer privacy, reverse engineering, encryption, etc.). Considering that these people are going to be making the rules that will affect all of our future internet dealings, don't you think it's fair, and even right, to give them as much of a leg up as they need?
(Sigh...shouldn't've gotten started...)
Interrobang
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
But how is it possible to live in a world without metaphors?
Ok, sure, metaphors simplify the situation. I'm sure that everybody who reads the New York Times (and most of the people who read slashdot minus the Natalie Portman/grits/Goatsex contingent) is a fairly intelligent person. With that it mind, even the extremely intelligent will not be able to fully grasp and articulate all the intricasies of the privacy battle today. The situation is simply too complex and too fluid in order to explain coherantly. Would you really want someone to go through a forty five minutes introductory speech everytime someone wanted to discuss a point of privacy? Of course not.
This is why we have metaphors. We use them as a cognative shortcut. We can't possible go through the world and understand everything about so in order to allow ourselves to have any opinion at all about most things we accept and utilize these metaphors. To most people (at least most people who read Slashdot and the New York Times) saying the phrase "Big Brother" is not simply referencing a metaphor. We instantly begin to reference everything we know about Big Brother, 1984, Winston Smith, George Orwell, fascism, totalitarianism, distopias and everything else. We combine it into a single phrase: "Big Brother" but it's really just a very large collections of concept from a fictional world that are combined with our experiences in the real world in order to make sense of everything.
Eh, whatever, I like metaphors.
--
RumorsDaily
It doesn't matter whether we use Kafka
or Orwell to explain these issues to
the general public, when Joe Sixpack
hasn't read either of them.
I hope I'm wrong.
Privacy concerns, and governments addresses over these concerns, are like water and oil. Current events should point out the true factors when thinking about these two, although many never take the time to delve deeper into the situation, often overlooking many important factors that would normally be an outrage after the occurance, but seldom questioned until it is too late.
Politicians are often older people who will never utilize computers in the same fashions as us, and often do not understand what is going on. Law enforcement often uses scare tactics by injecting some outrageous scenarios into the minds of these politicians using cryptic terms themselves in hoping these politicians will pass these laws without incident, which will benefit law enforcement, and cripple the people.
Breakdown of questionable issues:
HR46 was an attempt to sneak a fast one.
Carnivore was used dozens of times and the FBI claims it was mostly on hackers. Note: Its been found that the Carnivore snoops everything on a segment what about your traffic? Were you on that network, was your traffic snooped?
makes me wonder...
FBI claims Castro is a hacker. In a country where they have close to nothing, do you really believe Cuba is a threat to the US, or is this just an attempt to step on Cuba when their down?
Bin Laden using technology to hide activities. Note: this isn't new news and judging from experiences in history, we've always needed an enemy for the sake of remaining a super power by enforcing authority. So if Osama is such a huge threat why isn't he stopped cold? Because the government can't or because they don't want to for the purpose of having an enemy?
Take a quick look at some of the stuff posted by Louis Tenet this week and do some rational thinking about how situations arise which can be handled by government, but are often purposely misconstrued for the sake of promoting other hidden agendas. Government will try to take as much privacy away as they can, any government so don't be fooled.
And it goes on and on with no end in site.
shhh... the world is out to get me
"When I was a Buddhist, it drove my parents and friends crazy, but when I am buddha, nobody is upset at all"
The media uses Big Brother as a metaphor because Joe Public recognizes the reference, period. Many (most) of the New York Times readers have not read 1984, and many probably do not even know where the reference comes from, but almost all will understand the reference to mean a watchful central authority. This may be in part to a moderately successful "reality TV" program we're all too familiar with, but regardless, it's effective.
If 95% of people understand the phrase "Big Brother tactics", and 1% appreciate the more profound "like K's trial", it's better to use the Orwell reference. It will have a more powerful effect, even if not quite as accurate.
Dear Carl S. Kaplan,
I read your Times article online. Thank you for taking the time
to bring to light Professor Solove's work. I look forward to his
final draft.
I am very concerned about privacy myself, not just online but
offline as well. Solove's conclusion calls for government
regulation to address our society's privacy concerns. I believe
the exact opposite would be more beneficial. If the federal,
state, and local governments would stop requiring me to use my
social security number for nearly everything I do, I feel I could
protect my privacy quite easily.
The government does not want privacy. How could they? True
privacy would mean not reporting my financial activities to the
IRS. True privacy would allow me to obtain a driver's license in
California without having to give a thumbprint. True privacy
would allow me to buy a firearm without a background check.
Why would the government want this? Privacy will only decrease
the amount of power and control they have in society.
Stuart Eichert
Stuart Eichert
The problem with computing metaphors is that by teaching abstractions of techonologies rather than teaching people how those technologies work circumvents user education of how a system really works. This isn't a problem in itself if the metaphors are good ones, but its been my experience that more often that not the metaphors chosen are rather bad. Mainstream media, in particular, tends to come up with really lousy metaphors. This can be very dangerous, particularly for liberties, as it can leave many people with a very distorted view of technologies such as encryption, surveillance, hacking/cracking etc. This is only made worse by the fact that mainstream media, in order to get more readers, often adopts the 'scarepiece' approach and intentionally presents a distorted, sensationalist view of a technology. Also, the FBI very often deliberately presents twisted metaphors designed to scare people and convince the public and lawmakers that they need more snooping rights etc. I wish I could think of some good examples right now.
The only true solution is proper user education of how systems work - then nobody can be manipulated by the presentation of incorrect facts through cleverly chosen unsuitable metaphors. I don't know if this is realistic though, unless you want to send thousands of lawyers, judges, politicians, journalists etc on extensive computer courses.
There are obviously some legal problems with forbidding web sites from collecting data that users voluntarily give them. Slashdot has my e-mail address, which I gave them voluntarily. The only difference between them and Amazon.com is that I personally consider Slashdot to be more trustworthy. I don't see how legislation could allow me to give my info to Slashdot, but protect me against Amazon's stated willingness to sell my information if they go bankrupt or are acquired. I just made a mistake by sharing my information with Amazon. I should have read their privacy policy and stayed away.
But leaving it up to personal choice isn't the whole solution. For instance, every supermarket in my area has a program where they keep track of what you buy. If you don't participate in the program, they charge you higher prices. Here there's a problem with lack of choice.
Another issue is that often you don't know what information is being collected about you. For example, there are the infamous "web bugs," invisible 1x1 images that tell somebody what pages you've been surfing or whether you opened their spam. This issue is exactly what The Trial is about. Again, there's no real choice for most people. I'm among the tiny percentage of the population that's sophisticated enough to turn off images and html in my e-mail program, but I haven't bothered looking into ways to avoid hitting web bugs inadvertently when I websurf. And most people simply don't have the time or expertise to keep up to date with how to protect themselves against this kind of stuff.
Legislation might be part of the solution. A more important part of the solution might be create an internet infrastructure that is technologically privacy-friendly. An example of this is the way browsers let you look at cookies and reject them if you want to; not a very successful example, but this is the kind of thing that needs to be worked on. Another thing is that there are still many web sites out there that ask for your personal information, but don't have any posted privacy policy -- we should all exert pressure on them to improve their practices.
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but Kafka & Orwell are not even close to the horizon. I know that every author and his mother loves to write stories about privacy that use the line "Big Brother is Watching!" But the images that Kafka and Orwell portray are much more systemic and detailed than the "invasion of privacy" that internet monitoring causes.
Perhaps on the net, but the time to prevent it is before it gets here!
In other areas it's closer. You get denied for a loan. Why? you might ask. Because of some information out there about you. They won't tell you which piece of information. You can't think of what it might be.
It has come out that in some cases, the critical piece of information is the number of times your information has been looked up recently.
Your auto insurance went up. same questions. Did they get bogus information about a (non-existant) moving violation? Good question.
There are many situations where some information about us (correct or not) is used to our detriment, and we don't even have the legal right to know what information that is.
On several occasions, I have had a check declined (with plenty of money in my account to cover it). In both cases, I found out that the problem was a downed network so that they couldn't check with my bank. It took several hours and a good bit of social engineering to get that information. Their 'official' position, the one I could painlessly get w/o social engineering was that they could neither confirm or deny that there was an issue with my check or credit rating or wheather or not my check should be accepted if I try again.
There is a fascinating article on the Register about how IBM helped out the Nazis during WWII. All of that data processing capability IBM sold to them allowed the Nazis to be far mor efficient in implementing their "final solution." Granted, it was "only" punch card technology, but it still helped them tremendously.
This is the marriage of bureaucracy and privacy concerns.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"