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Privacy In the Age of Persistence
Bruce Schneier recently wrote another essay on privacy for the BBC concentrating on how data seems to be the "pollution of the information age" and where this seems to be leading. "We're not going to stop the march of technology, just as we cannot un-invent the automobile or the coal furnace. We spent the industrial age relying on fossil fuels that polluted our air and transformed our climate. Now we are working to address the consequences. (While still using said fossil fuels, of course.) This time around, maybe we can be a little more proactive. Just as we look back at the beginning of the previous century and shake our heads at how people could ignore the pollution they caused, future generations will look back at us — living in the early decades of the information age — and judge our solutions to the proliferation of data."
Anything you post in this thread will be on the Internet forever, so be careful!
While I believe that "information wants to be free", that can have negative consequences as well. Just as we were forced (and it is true, we were) to regulate all kinds of physical businesses (power, chemical, the list is huge) so that they did not pollute us to death, it will probably be necessary to regulate information businesses in a like manner.
Look at what happens to people when the run for office. We found some pictures of Barack Obama when he did some joke modeling thing with one of his friends in college (or something like that).
Can you imagine if we had a searchable index of every single conversation a presidental or senatorial candidate had ever had?
Imagine being in your 40s and having to account for a "private" conversation that you had 20 years ago at 2:00am when you were drunk.
*shudder*
Guys, this isn't some crazy whackjob ranting about the evil government. This is reality! My username can, with not a whole lot of work, be tied to me in real life. If somebody wanted to, they could go back through every single comment I had ever made on any message board or blog that I use this handle on.
Scary. Really really scary. My bet is that almost everybody is in this same boat. Google has made it TOO easy to find things.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
I want to see David Brin's response to this, in the light of The Transparent Society.
This time around, maybe we can be a little more proactive.
Different people will make same mistakes that our fathers did. They will learn from their mistakes, just as our fathers learned, but the next time around new people will make same mistakes again anyway.
"..verge of big brother .."
AAAAAAHHHHHH!!!
Clearly you didn't understand the book.
A) Elected officials change.
B) If everyone has the information, then the information can not be redacted
C) With global information it is harder to lie to your people about who you ahve always been at war with(create tension with)
D) Our Cameras point both ways.
E) The technology that would be needed for 'big brother' is available to all, not controll be a government
F) I don't ahve to sneak away to some abandoned house with my lover and worry about getting arrested for questioning the government.
I could go on.
We ahve a conscience.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...is not nearly as much of a problem as the proliferation of noise with respect to signal. In the end, whatever survives is whatever is dominant (ie: the most successful in the environment) which is not the same as whatever is actually useful. If noise is the dominant element, then noise is what will endure and the signal will die. It will be out-competed. Basic darwinism.
THIS is the pollution, not the persistence of information. There's probably not much more real information being produced now than there was at any time in the Age of Enlightenment, so it really doesn't matter if it persists. It'd be great if it persisted better. The problem is the creeping crud. This isn't about freedom to express oneself, since that is also information (sometimes too much information, in another sense of the term). Nobody claims a Nigerian scammer is expressing themselves. Well, if you DO claim that, I've a few billion in gold that could be yours if you just supply me with some information first.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I can't read tfa at work.
A few things. Change the law such that:
a) as little data as possible needs to be given up in the first place
b) when possible, non-identifying data should be used
b) data needs to be retained for as short of a time period as possible
As usual, these are precisely the things that will not be done, and will in fact be fought against by society at all levels. Because we're idiots.
And as usual, if we actually did those things, then we might have less law and more liberty. Oh the horror.
Billy Brown rides on. Yolanda Green bypasses Gary White.
the internet is a series of servers and wires beyond your control. please note: BEYOND YOUR CONTROL. therefore, regardless of any law, written in bold 72 pt font in blood, no one can reasonably expect anything to be private on this system. buried in your deskdrawer, in your house, there you can find privacy. on the wide open internet, the very notion of privacy is philosophically impossible, like oil and water, the two concepts
furthermore, much of what people are shocked to find that the internet can know about them is detritus. pointless bits and pieces. in other words, no facts about yourself that anyone would consider seriously private in terms of anything that can damage you, unless you are some sort of hysteric. were it even to be found and associated with you, needle in a haystack this stuff is, the very effort that be mustered to even care is ridiculous. yeah, its "private" facts about you in that it is associated with you personally. but the to me the notion of privacy includes some sort of horrible damagin facts about you
and even beyond that, much of this detritus wouldn't exist without the internet in the first place. its not like you had some sort of private facts about yourself, then the internet came along and stole them from you. no, these random bits and pieces about your life only exist because YOU choose to go out on the internet and PUT it there
finally, it is entirely possible to manage your online identity in such a way that what goes on there, behind this moniker or on that site or in this newsgroup or on that facebook page or with that avatar or in that email: you consciously manage what is disclosed and what isn't under that rubrik. this really is nothing new or weird. people, in real life, long before the internet, often managed different parts of their identity in different social spheres of their life
in short, privacy on the internet is:
1. impossible. not legally impossible, but beyond that: philosophically impossible
2. pointless. mediocre bits of flotsam and jetsam where you have to be quite a hysterical person to even care that someone else knows this about you
3. native to the internet. without the internet, this detritus wouldn't exist in the first place. no privacy was "stolen" from you. its the same half-witted reasoning that calls file sharing "stealing" and "piracy". you PUT the information there, with your full conscious authorization of the implications involved
4. completely normal and in line with the entire human history of identity plasticity, manipulation, and management
in short, why the HELL do people get so worked up over this bullshit concept of privacy on the internet. there is none! just accept reality, move on
i honestly believe that kids in their teens, and younger, would find this entire conversation just plain weird. that if you grow up with the internet, this entire issue is beyond understanding, simply because what you do on the internet and privacy is i think natively understood by those who grow up with the internet to be disconnected concepts
tempest in a teapot. an absurd and pointless topic
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
i smoked marijuana. why should i be ashamed of that? why must i pander to weakminded shrill people i don't even like whose opinions on making marijuana illegal i consider wrong?
furthermore, why should we pander to over judgmental assholes who would hold against somebody some indiscretion of their from high school?
i understand what i did in high school should not be held against me, you understand that, anyone of any moral integriy does too. in which case, who are we really trying to pander too? oh: weak minds, overjudgmental minds: people who would find something wrong with you anyway, regardless of your ability to white wash your past in the pre-internet age
and in fact, it is GOOD it is hard to hide now. if no one can hide that they tried marijuana, if everyone has to come out and admit they tried it, the sheer preponderance of the weight of the hypocrisy of it all begins to collapse this whole rotten veneer that some people actually believe this stuff is bad for you, and some other assholes pay such fools lip service
let it all come out, let it stay out, and let it prove what is really right and what is really wrong
in short, the persistence of this information is a good thing. the judgment of something being bad or good is not dependent upon your ability to hide something in shame. my judgment of you will be fair base don your character as it is today, now, not as when you were a high schooler, and so will anyone else with a solid morality, and as for anyone who is not, to hell with them, and they would find something wrong about you in the hysterical minds anyways
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why do we need privacy? Invariably the reason seems to be: "I don't want others to know what I am doing".
Followed by: "because they might do something harmful to me because of it". (there is another argument as well, which I will cover after this one)
Actually, that last bit is NOT the way people usually say it, but I said it that way to make my point easier.
We know that in history there have been times that it was very bad to have certain people know something about you. Godwin be damned, but having people know your religion was not always something good. Nazi germany used "harmless" census data gathered earlier to exterminate those who to them had undesirable census data.
Privacy advocates would argue that if this census data had NOT contained religion, it would have been better, but would it? A similar bit of potential census data was used by another organization to hunt down those it found undesirable. The KKK. Skin color. That you can't keep private/hidden away. If you are black, you are black and it tends to be fairly noticable unless you want to go to the most extreme forms of privacy (burka).
Blacks being prosecuted by white racists did NOT benefit from the fact that the US did not collect skin color in its census data. So in this dark era of the previous century, privacy would not have protected those lynched in the US.
Would it have protected the jews in europe? Some, but not all. Those who hid away their religion, because they were only related to jews but not actually religious themselves or had learned not to be noticed might have had better changes. But any jew who practiced his/her faith would have been noticed regardless of census data and suffered the same fate.
The privacy advocates suffer from the fact that they are looking at the short term and only at information that can be hidden if you all wish to confirm to the majority world view. Take the constant cases of online communities banning homosexuals who dare to come out of the closet online. Recent example Xbox-live, banning a lesbian for daring to be a lesbian. As long as she blends in with the majority (or at least the mob) she was safe. Keep her sexuality private.
But is this what we want as a society?
Let me know make my point.
We would be better off in a society where we had no privacy but nobody was prosecuted for information about their person.
A jew in nazi germany would have been better off if the fact that a person was jewish did NOT matter. Well DUH you might say but think about it. If society doesn't judge you based on your sexuality then there is no reason for it to be private. Simple example: Blondes. We all know that blondes are dumb, ergo you might wish this information to be private so you are not judged on your hair color in your job application. Silly? Well there are experiments to just that with nationality in job applications to stop people being discriminated against based on where they were born. BUT place of birth needs ONLY be private IF you are judged on it. If there was no discrimination, there would be no need to keep things hidden.
So for instance the law against age limits in jobs and that you do NOT have to list your age on a resume is just a lazy privacy law against the real problem of age discrimination. If we got rid of age discrimination, we would I think have a better society then a society in which your age is private.
Why? Again, the xbox-live example or for that matter, the white black man, or the gentile jew. As long as the lesbian, the black person or the jew blend into the crowd, behave like the mob and don't stand out, they were somewhat safe. Until the mob decides that their behaviour ain't enough like the mob. Note that the lesbian might also wish to hide that she is a female on a gaming network.
Just how free is a society where you are allowed to be a different religion just as long as it isn't known by society?
Privacy laws like this are ONLY known as long as we allow society to discrimi
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