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Privacy, From Outside The Paranoid Fold
An unnamed reader points to this: "Good, non-technical article on privacy running at The Atlantic." Though the article is non-technical, it isn't ignorant. The author realizes (or rather, reports that other people are realizing) that privacy is not inimical to business, but that the two can have a complex and more-than-occasionally troubling relationship.
It wasn't the size of the device, it was the prospect of this being done to children that gave me pause.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I should probably know better than to respond to anyone with nothing more to discuss in public than the size of his device.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
This was the part of the article that leaped out at me and sent a chill down my spine.
A split-second later, I thought of the times when being able to get an instant fix on the location of my niece or nephew using something built into my watch or cell phone would have saved me a few anxious moments, which I get enough of anyway from those two.
Just your standard, double-edged sword, the future's rushing at us so fast it's already the past, type dilemma.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I honestly can't see any democratic government persuading the public into allowing themselves to be tagged in this manner. I really don't see us all itching a spot on our wrist like Sylvester does in Demolition Man.
No utopian leader is going to use smooth talking and bullshit to get us to bow down to this, but if they do, you can beat I will be one of the "crazies" in the sewers eating rat burgers.
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COME IN, I'M LONELY
I regard my college ethics class as one of the most important courses, in terms of later events.
Within a couple years, I worked for a service bureau that did the accounting for Evergreen Air (CIA contractor for airplanes during the Vietnam War - their monthly income was in eight figures). This was about the same time as my draft lottery number came out above 300 - high enough that I was not pulled into the meatgrinder. I recall asking the owner if servicing that CIA Vietnam contract company was ethical. His reply was that someone would do the work, it might as well be his firm. I didn't quit, but I didn't feel good about this.
Later, I worked for a systems integration company that was building the new control system for the Northwest power grid. It ran on a dual PDP-10 system (anyone remember TECO?) with lots of lower level PDP-8 telemetry and control systems. It is likely still there, BTW. They had lots of grad student programmers, and those guys would go out water-skiing on Saturday and log it as overtime! I mentioned this to them, but they didn't want to hear about it. They were late, and needed programmers.
Another employer was a Savings & Loan. They did not pay interest on impounded funds (for property tax, insurance, etc.) and eventually lost in court over this. After I left, they got screwed worse by the Feds, who - after forcing them to combine with insolvent S&Ls - suddenly changed the rules, forcing them to be acquired by Bank of America. There are relative levels of power and betrayal.
Then I spent a couple of years at an insurance company. After pointing out that the CIO's pet project wasn't working and should be scrapped (for which I won a $50 suggestion award), I was fired. So much for helping a corporation see its errors.
Another company's stock tanked; they were acquired by a corporate raider who proceeded to move them to Florida, extracting all the cash and leaving an empty shell for the creditors. By the time the SEC and courts prohibited him from owning another public company, Victor Posner was too old to care. With money and lawyers, you can get away with the corporate equivalent of murder, ethics be damned.
At another shop suffering through downsizing, I saw posted: "Youth and skill is overcome by old age and treachery." True, don't trust a company. Management looks out for themselves, not people who work for them, and least of all stockholders.
Then I worked for two Big-8/6/5 firms for over ten years. When directed to lie to a large client on the issue of mainframe capacity, I refused to do so. I'm now working elsewhere, for a better firm.
You can see ethical lapses around you, but unless you're in a position of power, you often can't affect things in any meaningful way. But, if you can, do so: it feels better.
If your school offers one, I heartily recommend taking a scientific ethics course.
:).
It puts your mind into the right frame to question what you're being asked to do.
Speaking as one who has quit two jobs because of faulty ethics on behalf of my employers, I now state up front during the interview process, "Be aware. If you ask me to do something against my sense of ethics, I will quit." In my case this flows natually from the usual, "Why did you leave this job after 6 months?" question
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Remove the rocks to send email
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Note that no "globalist conspiracy" is required to generate coherent action toward these ends -- merely the incentives inherent in global mobility.
To take a simple example, multidrug resistant strains of TB have arisen due to the abuse of antibiotics in the Former Soviet Union. Soros has been promoting an "Open Society" in Russia and, in so doing, is now privy to the data on incidents of multi drug resistant TB transmission occuring during air travel within the FSU. The threat of this epidemic spreading to other parts of the world is profound, yet Soros and his globalist cohorts can't seem to come to grips with the fact that in their push for putting the globe through a mix-master as fast as the societies can stand -- they not only run the risk of reactionary backlash, they are setting the stage for a variety of epidemics of not only biological disease, but of criminal activities and political degeneration that is so rapid, the social control structures of civilization simply will not be able to withstand the onslaught.
In Soros's case, he at least recognizes some of his responsibility to do something about multidrug resistant strains of TB, but this sort of after-the-fact reaction to a manifest problem has not influenced him to recognize his underlying ethical conflict-of-interest in putting the world at greater risk through ill-considered mobility.
One of the primary reasons for local communities is to allow experimental controls -- a societal laboratory in which many diverse ideas and structures can be tried and tested in isolation from one another lest the lessons learned be obscured by too great a number of variables in too short a time.
People say they want security, and I believe them -- but I do not believe it when globalists say they want global security. What they want is to secure their own position by increasing the necessity for globalists -- even if that puts the entire globe at unacceptably high levels of risk.
Seastead this.
The problem is that social phenomena apply to people, not to large corporate entities like companies and governments. Ordinary people are willing to let others have privacy because they don't want their own privacy violated, but when you start dealing with a corporate entity that reciprocity is not applicable. Companies and governments generally assume that other people are trying to steal their secrets, so they rely on active measures to protect them rather than the politeness of others. That also means that they are less likely to respect the unprotected secrets of others.
More importantly, even social conventions about privacy can be violated with reason. You might not read somebody's diary if you found it, but a suspicious person might very well try to lay their hands on the diary of the person they were suspicious of to find out if their beliefs were well founded. Those investigation companys exist because people are willing to violate others' privacy on occasion. Companies and governments are much more purposeful than individuals (they basically exist for a specific purpose, after all), so if they decide that invading people's privacy serves their goals you can bet they'll do it. They're less socially constrained and have stronger motivation, which is a very dangerous combination.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I wouldn't. I think the idea of privacy laws is fine, but I see a danger: since the laws exist, people will believe that technological solutions are unnecessary.
The two methods aren't mutually exclusive; privacy laws simply provide a legal foundation you can use to protect your freedom.
Ultimately, laws only work if you catch the lawbreakers, and if you can prove that they broke the law.
That's true, and it's why we have law-enforcement agencies and a criminal court system. Lawbreakers are caught, prosecuted, and convicted every day, just because it's hard doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
Technological solutions also have the advantage that they work against abusive authorities as well as private abusers.
This is one of the reasons why I think we should go so far as to make it a Constitutional amendment. The amendments to the Constitution tend to be limits on governmental authority, and legal history is full of rulings against the government based on the Constitution.
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While I'm glad that privacy protection has become a thriving business, I'd rather see some more thorough privacy laws go into place. I know it might be heretical to say this on slashdot, but the free market isn't a solution to everything; sure privacy protection might make good business sense now, but what if it doesn't in the future? Do we suddenly lose our rights to privacy (and I do think it is a basic right) just because a few companies file for chapter 11? I'd rather see maybe a Constitutional amendment to ensure individual privacy, with maybe criminal charges brought against executives of companies that break the law.
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http://www.digitrends.net/marketing/13637_14459.ht ml
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Uh... plastic surgeons make a lot of money performing unecessary surgery involving implants a lot larger than the ones we're talking about.
Much larger.
Much, much larger.
And the snippet I gave above is only the smallest fraction of the content of the article. It isn't even a primary point. It is just a part of the introduction.
I'm going to have to bookmark this mag, just because it helps excercise my brain cell.
;-)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
While we shouldn't panic and reject all such advances out of hand, we'd do well to subject each to a healthy dose of public deliberation before handing over another nugget of liberty.
Oh, I agree with you completely here; it would obviously make things simpler for government if people didn't interfere with them--which is why dictators become dictators and not presidents or prime ministers. Since we have the opportunity to watch and (to an extent) limit what government does, we should absolutely take advantage of that and make sure the government doesn't do things we don't want it to do.
What I'm saying is that that will happen without extensive worrying about the matter. I recall a quote from the article by some political figure saying that privacy would be one of the major issues, if not the major issue, in the next 3-5 years (correct me if I misstated it). That's society saying "we want privacy, give it to us."
As you say, of course, we should definitely be aware of what's going on, and if there is cause for alarm, it would be that government is trying to slip things through behind our backs. But I'm pretty sure that most people are at least aware of privacy issues at this point, which is why I say I don't think we need to jump up and down and panic just yet.
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BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL
The cameras allow you to be followed invisibly, you never know if someone is watching you through the camera, you're in the panopticon. It's not the same as being seen by others on the street.
Is it now? Do you really think you could spot a skilled tail in a crowded street, or even a not-so-crowded one? Detective agencies were around long before the Internet and networked video cameras, and they didn't survive through failure. And for that matter, in a crowded street, could you even begin to guess at who might be watching you? I didn't think so.
But being under the "gaze" of a camera isn't like that. . . . [T]he cameras and the people behind the cameras are there specifically to watch. That plants the question, "are they watching me?"
To which I say, "Do I give a damn? No." End of story. Because they're not watching me, they're watching the city, in which I happen to be (at least in this hypothetical circumstance). As I said in my original comment, they have absolutely no reason to focus in on me in particular, because I don't make a whit of difference in the grand scheme of things. Now, if I pulled out a gun and started shooting people, that's a different story; but in that circumstance I'd deserve what I got anyway.
Suppose you were a cop, assigned to watch the other end of all these cameras. Would you really feel like writing down what every person who passes one of the cameras is doing? For that matter, could you even physically do that in the time available? I didn't think so.
Even computers don't really change the equation that much; they provide a lot more eyes to watch the cameras, but that's all. Even with face recognition, that would at best let you determine when someone was in view of what camera--no more than your typical detective agency could tell you, and probably less. And even if this data was accumulated for every person in the city, and even if it was stored, that still wouldn't make a difference, because nobody cares about you.
Even supposing the face-recognition software failed, and identified you as Jack Q. Serial Killer, computers don't arrest people--cops (i.e. people) arrest people, and they could tell the difference more easily. In the worst case, yes, maybe some people will be falsely arrested, but even then, society will respond as it sees fit, either getting the silly system trashed, or accepting it as one of the costs of a safer city. (And if they did accept it, and you don't like it, well, just don't go there.)
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BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL
There are some good points here, and I hope people read farther than the bit about the Digital Angel on the first page (there are four pages, in case you didn't notice). I like the author's assertion that business will itself provide an answer to the question of how to control our private information in the "information age"; it's a refreshing change from the doomsayers. But one thing I found a bit disappointing was that the author only touched briefly on just what sort of beast "privacy" is, because I think it's a misunderstanding of that basic area that's causing a lot of unnecessary alarm.
As the author of the article points out, privacy is, above all, a social phenomenon. In other words, privacy is something that exists because society (i.e. people) considers it a Good Thing. But what a lot of people seem to forget is that that works both ways; because it is a social phenomenon, ordinary people won't take advantage of it even if they had the ability to, such as via a cracked server. If you noticed that someone had dropped their diary, you might pick it up and return it to them, but you wouldn't open it up and start reading, would you? (I hope not, anyway.) That's what privacy is.
Besides, if someone really wants to find out stuff about you, they can do that just fine with or without computer/Internet assistance. Hidden cameras, bribes and/or threats to friends or neighbors, that sort of thing. Investigation agencies don't make their money sitting at their desks and hacking into servers, either. But the fact is that no one cares about you, in that sense. We are still a long way from anything like 1984, despite what the doomsayers would tell you; nobody cares enough about what individual people are doing to monitor everyone (not that people would stand for it; such a proposal would go down in seconds, I think, at least in the US). Even the video camera surveillance system in Britain mentioned on Slashdot occasionally is a far cry from Orwell's world; some people seem to have forgotten that when you're in public, well, you're in public, and you shouldn't have any expectation of privacy anyway. Or perhaps that's just British society's view, and U.S. society is different? I don't know.
If society changes its collective mind and decides that it doesn't need privacy any more, then yes, of course you should be afraid (if you like privacy). But I haven't seen any massive shift in people's thinking that would suggest anything like that; if anything, as the article points out, people these days are looking for more privacy, not less. So let's stop the panicking now, okay?
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BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL
In Sydney, Australia you must by law register cats and dogs and implant a microchip inside them which allows the animal to later be identified.
Through eveoloution, the next phase of this technology will be chips which allow you to track your stray cat.
This technology is also useful in the assistance of saving endangered species etc.
I am not sure if this is already happening or not but, imagine if you could track panda populations in the wild just by tracking the chips that were implanted in them as babies instead of having to have humans go in the wild, tranquilize the animal and then check to see what it's been upto.
This in fact could open up an whole new era of humans being able to track animals in their natural habitat and find out animal behavioural patterns etc without having to physically enter/disturb the habitat.
But picture this also.
30 or so years after this technology is in place with animals and is seen as safe and solid, they could start to trial this technology on prisoners for example to see how they go in society at first and slowly introduce it to every baby born.
I think all technology can be used for good. It's just a matter of doing so.
Try telling the average person that paying for a movie ticket or DVD instantly augments marketing profiles of themeslves...They might not believe you!
People in general need to be appraised of the fact that all this is happenning. We can shout and intellectualize and scream all we want about it on slashdot. It won't do anything because we're still a fringe community composed mostly of techies and other technologically in-the-know people.
All the stuff about ID tags embedded in bodies and dynamically updated databases will be hurled steadily towards us until the majority of people wake up and realise what's going on, and what governments and corporations are trying to push on them "for their best interests." In this case, people are not stupid. They are ignorant.
O'Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Law:
The problem is not "society changing its collective mind and deciding we don't need privacy any more", but rather individual agents or bureaucrats deciding that it's so much more efficient to quietly invade privacy than to pursue normal noisy channels of investigation. Once we've given up our privacy (trusting each other not to abuse it) there's no way to get it back if the game suddenly changes.
And really, no matter how much our society values privacy, there will always be individuals willing to trample it. Most likely the first abuses will rise from very noble intentions ("Lo-Jack for kids! Never worry about losing your child again! If he's kidnapped, Lo-Jack will recover him within 45 minutes!"), but how easy it would be for a small group of people to build on that complacency and take it to the next level.
While we shouldn't panic and reject all such advances out of hand, we'd do well to subject each to a healthy dose of public deliberation before handing over another nugget of liberty.
Well, the way I see it there are basically two kinds of information out ther that pertain to individuals: information that is unique to the individual, and information that is assigned. Unique information is the information you create (intellectual products like a diary, a sketchbook, a portfolio of code, or the next killer app.) and the information you are (DNA, medical records, psych profiles, etc.). The assigned information is things given to you by others that they create (phone number, SSN, credit records, ISP logs, work evaluations, school records). I see two basic rights here: 1. Unique information about individuals shall not be collected, examined, duplicated, analyzed, or infringed upon in any way without affording exclusive rights to the origin, form, and profits related to such information. 2. Assigned information shall not be owned, counted as capital asset, or transferred. It shall not be disclosed without unanimous consent of all individuals in a data set. 2A. The issuer of assigned information is responsible for all damages incurred from the improper use or inaccurate collection and disclosure. I'm not sure about the 2A but the rest seems right. The bottom line is that criminal responsibility for the violation of specific, personal information isn't as effective as crafting a broad foundation in civil law before we start sending out the cops to bust heads.
He's got a few stories about ex-pats over there who were not so lucky with their children. Provided they were SAFE I would have one of these implanted in my children in a second, and once they are old enough have it removed.
However, having had a scare a couple of years back with a guy who was stalking my girlfriend, maybe it'd be better to leave it in.
Being a 23 year old soon-to-be electrical engineer (I want to go into widepread MAN and WAN design and implementation), I often ask myself "How much of what I want to do is going to be used/abused" by those who are going to be able to access the information that I want to be accessible anywhere, anytime, by anyone. What are the limits of information restriction, who decides, and most importantly, how can and should it be implemented?
I was going to respond to this article, but the Subversive-Activities-Detector-Device implanted in my neck went off when I tried to write the words "corporate accountability".
That article painted a nice 'n rosy picture of how I should feel much safer now that Big Business is moving into the privacy market to watch out for me. Does the author of the article really expect me to buy into that? I prefer the idea of keeping my privacy concerns private. As the saying goes, "You'd better watch out for yourself, because no one else is going to."
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.