Slashdot Mirror
Reconciling Information Privacy and Liberty?
thetan asks: "F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that 'The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.' However, for many outsiders, it's hard to understand how cliques reconcile seemingly contrarian views.
For example, many US Republicans are against abortion but in favour of the death penalty (no doubt they have their reasons). Amongst the Slashdot commentariat, one often hears that information wants to be free, almost as a catchcry of the open source, copyfight and related info-libertarian movements. OTOH, these same Slashdot readers stridently guard their privacy, so presumably information about their shopping preferences or websurfing does not 'want to be free'. How does the intelligent and functional Slashdot crowd reconcile the liberty of other people's information with the privacy of their own?"
...the intelligent and functional Slashdot crowd...
Bwah ha ha ha...are you enjoying your stay in our dimension? When are you due back in BizzaroWorld? ^_^
Seriously, though, I don't think any intellectually honest Slashdotter out there would assert that the vaunted 'information wants to be free' catch phrase should be interpreted as 'free as in beer'. Information is most certainly not free...if it was, many of us would be out of a job. This being the Information Age, information is the prime economic mover, and therefore, most slashdotters are understandably upset when their own personal information is mined by corporations and passed around as currency. This leads to a very real devaluation of our personal worth, as the intrusiveness of companies serves to reduce our quality of life.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I've noticed if one posts anything on Slashdot going "against the grain" of popularity (differing views on War in Iraq, Linux or Apple for example) The mods immediately presume your post is either a "Troll" or "Flamebait". People often have a hard time setting aside their personal beliefs and tend to view things in a biased manner. The unfortunate outcome of this is they end up burying otherwise interesting viewpoints.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
I have to agree with bigwavejas. Troll" on /. == Satire.
Oh, I wish there was a way to explain humor or a poor attempt at it to the mods.
And Goddam /. for inventing "Troll" and "Flamebait"
Famous "Troll"s and "Flaimers:" people:
Thomas Paine
Thomas Jefferson
Ben Franklin
Karl Marx
Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King
Martin Luther
Ghandi
etc ...
People who spoke what they truly believed and got Fucked for it!!!
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
I think that's an oversimplification. Society is the people that make it up and the world around them. There's a lot of information about you and I that we don't want everyone to know, but would help companies better target us and be beneficial to parts of society (their workers, plus the environment).
For instance, if the local grocery store was capable of printing customized flyers (it'll happen) and knows you just bought a 24 pack of toilet paper, it could exclude that from the items offered to you. If it knows you buy milk every week and haven't yet this week, it could make sure that milk is front and center on the first page. Maybe you buy a lot of red meat, so you don't need the special coupon for that.
Now, you probably don't want your buying habits to be public information. I know I want mine guarded! But clearly, having the information public is both beneficial (in the example above we've saved ink, paper, postage and your time in browsing our flyer) and harmful (because your insurance company might raise your premiums because you eat too much meat).
I don't think there's any information out there that isn't beneficial to some and harmful ot others. "Information wants to be free!" *is* hypocrisy. It's just an adult way of getting to use other toys without sharing your own. (Not that I think there's anything really bad with that, but we should be more honest about it.)
Ultimately the difference in what should and should not be opened to public scrutiny comes down to where the information originates. Corporate information should be open to the public because corporations exist only through the legal protections of Government, which exists only at the consent of the governed.
There are only two places this line blurs - when a person interacts with a corporation and when a person acts like a corporation.
In the first, while a corporation may choose to collect data on its customers, that data should never be for sale or distribution. Carelessness with or misuse of that data should meet with harsh consequences.
In the second, a person is engaging in public actions (such as the creation of intellectual properties) -- in such a case the information should be opened to public scrutiny.
These are my opinions. They are based around the fundamental assumption that, despite present legal structures, a corporation is not the same thing as an individual. Individuals have natural rights, and the right of a corporation to exist is something granted by a government. The two are not equal and thus the information they produce should also be unequal.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Many scientists make this very clear (and my wife is a research biologist, so we talk about this quite often):
There is a very distinct, provable, cellular and molecular difference between "Life" and "Human Life" in the normal process of cellular growth between a sperm and an egg. There is a very predictable period where that cell-that-is-dividing, can be told to become something other than a fetus. This is "Life". The cell is growing, dividing, becoming something larger than what it started as.
Beyond that point, where the cell has decided to continue to grow into a fetus and can no longer be repurposed as a non-fetal cell, it becomes "Human Life".
We seem to have no problem taking out cancerous tumors from our bodies, and those are also cells which are dividing and being nourished by the human bloodstream (technically, they are cells which are programmed to die, and ignore that signal, while new cells are put into place to replace them, hence the "tumor"). Why is killing one set of human cells wrong, and killing others ok? Who makes that decision? The state? The government? Where does it stop?
Personally, I see people deciding who should live and who should die all the time, without a single care for the larger body of humanity that will be affected (as well as their own life as a result of that crime), from all facets; economic, social and political.
I too am completely unreligious, and have my own beliefs about life, the world and the number 42.
Sweet! You totally ruined your topic by adding in an absolute truth. I detinately don't care about mosquitos having a right to live nor other pests. I don't care if other humans have a right to live and i don't care who decides to take away that right. All I care about is my rights. When i start to dictate rights to other people that do not affect me, then i am wrong because i am taking away liberty and freedom in the purest sense. Without privacy, freedom does not exist.
The whole idea about "Water likes to flow downhill" does not exist if all the water only existed at sealevel.
I've never liked the phrase "information wants to be free." I prefer "ideas want to be free." Art, music, theories, paradigms, processes, designs, schemas...those are the things that have the potential to grow and be useful only if shared. They get combined into larger and more complex ideas. They're hopelessly complicated to attribute, and nearly every new idea is composed of bits of old ideas. Assigning "ownership" to creative works, and particularly for long periods of time, simply prevents new ideas from occurring (or gets new-idea-creators sued into oblivion). Ideas should be free, as in air.
Data, on the other hand, comes in a lot of forms. Some of those forms, like data collected in government-sponsored studies, should ALSO be free. Free because we've already paid for it. Free, as in beer. Other forms of data don't "want to be free," and personal information like medical records are surely one of those. Of course, there are some reasonable exceptions. Like aggregated disease statistics.
With data, I think there is a balance. I'm a privacy fanatic, but I'd surely hate to see us in as big a mess with regulating the use of personal information as we have with copyright regulation. Good grief, can you imagine if we all acted like the RIAA, suing friends for telling other friends about our lousy bowling scores?
Part of where the line is drawn for me (and the "fair use" doctrine relies heavily on this) is the use to which data is put. Since uses for others'personal information is almost entirely either prurient or commercial in nature, I strongly disfavor that sort of "sharing." It's not cognitive dissonance to dislike seeing people getting personal monetary or "prurient" gain from the uncompensated work of other people, but to be totally fine with non-selfish uses.
Just because this can't be reduced to a short catch-phrase doesn't mean it's inconsistent. Life is complicated. Millions of people who would never STEAL anything under any circumstances instinctively realize that while downloading a song they haven't paid for isn't WRONG, but that downloading and using someone else's credit card number IS wrong. It should be obvious that this is complicated, but that reasonable rules can be derived.
~
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." -Emerson
The Village is dying of thirst. By pure chance, a limitless wellspring is discovered. The man who discovered the spring is calculating and without pity, and he refuses to tell the village where the water source is unless the people pay his outrageous fee. The community suffers deeply.
One night a clever Thief follows the man and discovers the location of the wellspring. The Thief hurries home and tells the community. Everybody proclaims him a Hero. The community is saved, and goes on to thrive and become happy and healthy.
Sometimes the Thief is also the Hero.
I would say that Ownership of information is far less important than the Intent of the owner.
-FL
People are for anything that benefits them, and against anything that hurts/harms/annoys them. If the Information to be "freed" is something they personally want or could use, then they're for the freedom, no matter who would be hurt by it.
Since the release of their own personal information would hurt them in some way, they're against the "freedom" of that information.
Only the rare individual will be for something that will benefit the vast majority but hurt them personally.
There's no conflict in the two views, just ordinary selfishness. Part of the brilliance in the original design of the US government is in the use of selfishness in what I call the "Balance of Greed" to keep the country reasonably free and prosperous. The problem, of course, is what happens when one party or the other stops being greedy enough to steal the other guy's lunch. But never fear, sooner or later an opportunist will come along to balance things again. It's inevitable.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Absent any preventive measures, anyone can access any information they can physically aprehend. Thus the natural state of information is to be free for anyone to use. Only when people try to limit the spread of information does it become non free, and even then, like water, if there is a crack in your container it will leak out.
Hope that explains the analogy.
As for information being free and privacy, privacy is a stopgap measure to protect those with less access to information and less ability to act on that information from depredations by those with more information and ability to act on it.
If there were no imbalance, there would be no need for privacy. If anyone actually used information in a way the majority considered immoral, then everyone would know about it an could stop the abuse. There would be no need for privacy in financial transactions because everyone would know if you stole. There would be no need for privacy in personal affairs because no one would be able to use that information against you unfairly.
This assumes some perfect method of not only recording everything that happens to everyone on the planet all the time, but distributes the information to everyone else and correlates it so that any important information can be sorted out of the huge mass of information that is of no importance.
Until that time, although your personal and private information "wants to be free" in the same way that water wants to leak out of a glass if it can, you should try to make sure your glass has no cracks in it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I disagree. And this is coming from someone who has railed against people in the past for confusing slashdot readers with a single organism rather than a diverse group of people.
However, like I said, I disagree with your take on this. I think the underlying question is interesting, many slashdot readers feel that information should be free, except their private information, which they want complete control over.
That being said, like others have pointed out, the "mantra" of "information wants to be free" is really just an observation. Like when a guy wins the lottery, and you say, "that guy is really lucky!" You are not saying that guy is currently lucky and good things will keep happening to him, you are just labelling him as being lucky based on what has happened to him in the past.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
If you were an Aristotlean, as most religious people are, despte their protestations, you have to __believe__ that nature abhors a vacuum, in spite of what our collective experience in outer space shows/tells you.
Its like living in a universe where the phlogiston theory actually works.
People are so stupid.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
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