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Understanding Privacy
privacyprof writes "Slashdot readers familiar with Professor Daniel J. Solove's essay, 'I've Got Nothing to Hide and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy,' might be interested in his new book, Understanding Privacy, which develops many of the ideas in that essay. As rapidly changing technology makes information increasingly available, there has been a great struggle to define privacy, with many conceding that the task is virtually impossible. The book argues there are multiple forms of privacy, related to one another by 'family resemblances.' It explains the framework for understanding privacy which was briefly discussed in the 'Nothing to Hide' essay. The book covers the framework in greater depth and explores how it applies to a wide array of privacy issues, such as data mining, surveillance, data security, and consumer privacy. Chapter 1 is available for free download."
*Everyone* has something they'd like to keep hidden. Can I watch you have sex with your spouse, or read your bank statement? Can I have your exact height and weight, and maybe get a glance at your mental health records? Do you mind if I videotape your grandfather's funeral? Got any love letters left over from Junior High I can read?
I don't pin everything on the government. However, they are indeed the primary source of privacy problems in the USA right now. We have, historically speaking, had good legal backup for the concept of privacy as embodied in the 4th amendment. The government is doing a great deal to erode those protections on many fronts at once, and this is, I maintain, the key area we need to focus on this issue. While I am not happy if John Q Moron personally invades my email stash, I am a lot more concerned if the government decides that's OK in the face of its own constituting authority. I'll deal with John Q later.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Property privacy:
"No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law."
Property Privacy Rights, part two:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Just something to think about.
Yes? What you say on the phone? The amounts, times and participants in your banking transactions? Your medical records? Your email? Your borrowings from the library? Your purchases from Amazon? Your credit card records? These comprise "public knowledge"?
I'm sorry, but I have to call your position the definitive "head in the sand" position. I cannot agree, even slightly.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That's a good working model. It doesn't account for someone who comes into your house and sprays graffiti on your walls, though.
Consider defining your equality this way:
Privacy = I decide who has access to me, those people I am responsible for, and those things that are mine.
Then go look at the fourth amendment. Carefully. Think about the role of persons, houses, papers, and effects as stated there, as well as how those things generalize into today's realities, and then take a moment to marvel and just how right those people got the issue.
Then take another to be absolutely horrified at how wrong today's government has gotten them.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
So if you have nothing to hide, you would be perfectly comfortable with "THEM" listening/watching/observing all communications made between you and: your friends; your family; your significant other (God knows I don't want some NSA operative reading some of the pet names I have for mine)? You're okay with them having access to all information relating to you, including name, age, sexual orientation, date of birth, blood type, medical history, insurance history, credit history, dating history, and I would go on, but I'm having trouble thinking of more personal things "THEY" would be interested in.
There's a concept known as the "slippery slope" that basically mirrors the saying, "Give X and inch, and they'll take a mile." If we let "THEM" listen in on phone conversations so that "THEY" can prevent terrorism, it'll be a matter of time until we're asked to endure the wiretapping because there are 'harmful dissidents' in the country, trying to harm the nation. Actually, for a real-world tangible example where you can see the effects of allowing your government to invade your privacy, look at China. Yeah, you can call semi-Godwin's Law on me for citing Communists, but tell me that I'm wrong. They claim that the censorship, the firewall, and all that is to help keep the country safe and sane, but who really believes that?
The action alone is already anything but ok, but the fact that you even wrote it in the right order to reflect the actions (read: commit the crime and retroactively make it legal) is what really kicks anything resembling an orderly state into the proverbial nuts.
It basically means the government can commit any crime. Should they be caught red handed, they just legalize it retroactively. If they don't get caught, no reason to talk about it altogether.
That doesn't really increase the faith and trust in the government and its agencies either. It's a sad time indeed when you're more afraid of your own country and its organisations rather than some kind of enemy.
Feels a bit like Soviet Russia, if you ask me...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You may or may not agree with trade unions just bear with me.
Most of us are lucky enough to live in democracies where we can make these choices and think nothing of it, we have nothing to hide after all. A few weeks after she started work, on the night of 23rd February 1981, fascist elements of the Spanish military attempted a coup and took control of the parliament. She spent the night along with her relative and other union officials burning and burying all the union membership details and correspondence because all of a sudden they did have something to hide, the mass graves of student radicals and trade unionists are still turning up from Franco's time .
Luckily the coup failed and democracy was quickly restored. The point being we can't burn or bury our electronic records, emails, phone logs, forum posts, blogs, journeys logged by electronic numberplate recognition and cellphone records because we don't have control of them. Privacy matters more than ever, the record of what you do now could last forever and you don't know who will use that information and for what purpose.
Actually, what makes anything difficult with humans is our being herd animals. We do stuff that we think would please the herd and make us better liked by our peers. Because we're nice and social like that.
Unfortunately, that can be used jujutsu style against us. Enter: groupthink. And there are those who figured out how to do that. It's not new, it's at least ten thousand years old, very probably even more.
Groupthink is a funny thing. Take for example a bunch of farmers, like in the infamous Goering quote, who each independently would rather work their farm than go risk death and crippling in a war where they have nothing to gain. Independently, each would rather _not_ go to war. Put them in a situation where each thinks "OMG, I'd lose face if the others think I'm a coward and unpatriotic" and watch them thump their chests and screaming pro-war slogans. Watch them cheer for the very things they despise secretly. Or conversely shaking a fist and yelling against the very things they desire.
And after a short while, cognitive dissonance kicks in, and they even lie to themselves that they really want those things they hate, and they really hate those things they want.
It's the emperor's new clothes story. Get a bunch of people who think everyone else sees those non-existent clothes, and that their standing would fall dramatically if they don't. Watch them all swear that they can see them clothes. In fact, watch cognitive dissonance kick in, and see them convince even themselves that they _do_ kinda see the clothes.
Where the Grimm Brothers got it wrong, is that that phenomenon is _very_ hard to unravel. In the story, all it takes is one kid shouting "the emperor is naked", for the whole charade to come apart. In reality, that wouldn't do jack squat.
In reality, for you to be brave, someone else must be a coward. To provide the comparison. For you to be smart, someone else must be stupid. For you to be a superior audiophile who hears the difference in downloaded MP3s with an audiophile Ethernet cable, someone else must be inferior enough to not hear it. Etc. The child shouting "the emperor is naked" just provides that other term of the comparison. It makes everyone else in the crowd pat their backs and congratulate each other that they're not like that simpleton kid who can't see the clothes.
It's a funny thing too, in that it's not even the emperor's guards that make it happen. They're at best a catalyst to get it started. Two hundred years later the emperor could be dead and his heirs guillotined long ago, the country could be a democracy, and the "clothes" could be in a museum showing the craftsmanship in the old days. Or maybe as proof of the excesses of nobility in the old days. And people would still come and squint and convince themselves that they _can_ see some fabulous clothes behind the glass. Just because everyone else does.
So what does this have to do with privacy? Well, that's why you have to explain to people exactly what privacy is and that it's not some shameful failing to need your personal space. Because there are plenty of those trying to make it sound like you're some horrible monster and your peers would surely shun you if you want privacy. The ball is already rolling towards turning it into a group-think situation, and there are interested parties pushing the ball in that direction too. You need more than just, well, "privacy is privacy, duh, and of course you need it" to defuse that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.