Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 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
--
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
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.
--
Yes, most of us are comfortable carrying our driver's license, and we don't mind carrying passports when travelling abroad.
Problem is, the implant idea can be introduced slowly and carefully. First as an option - a matter of convenience to those who don't want to carry cards, and perhaps the implant would carry other info like credit card #, elec. password, etc. making them very convenient. Then as it becomes widespread, it becomes law that everyone must have it.
Personally, I see no problem with everyone in the world having an advanced ID capable of many convenient things. My concern is that it should be the choice of the user to be anonymous in a tracking system. So I can walk through the streets of Washington D.C. and no one would know where I was if I tried to buy a subway ticket (i.e. ID would not be required more than it is now).
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
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?
--
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.
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".