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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.
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
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?
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BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL
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.