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What Should Be In a Technology Bill of Rights?
snydeq writes "The Deep End's Paul Venezia argues in favor of the creation of a Technology Bill of Rights to protect individuals against malfeasance, tyranny, and exploitation in an increasingly technological age. Venezia's initial six proposed articles center on anonymity rights, net neutrality, the open-sourcing of law enforcement software and hardware, and the like. What sort of efficacy do you see such a document having, and in an ideal world, which articles do you see as imperative for inclusion in a Technology Bill of Rights?"
Er, the right to defend yourself against the evils of viruses, malware, and if I dare to be redundant, DRM.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Oh, wait, the Constitution is routinely ignored by the Federal Government. So I'm sure a non-binding technology bill of rights will have a huge impact on limiting the Federal Government's actions...
Intel is going to publish their chip designs now?
Prosser: "Have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it run straight over you?"
Arthur: "How much?"
Prosser: "None at all."
The American founding fathers, from whom the Bill of Rights came, viewed rights a inherent to all individuals and not something granted by men. Either from God, or inherent in nature (or actually both, to my understanding).
These rights are what is referred to as "negative rights". Basically put, that you can do just about anything so long as it doesn't infringe on another's well-being. Everything in the Bill of Rights demonstratably follows from that--that the government shall not interfere. But it doesn't grant you special privileges, either--nothing that requires one else give it to you (well, with some exceptions like right to a speedy trial).
To then go on to talk about a Bill of Rights as some arbitrarily-agreed upon standards is ridiculous and on some level scary, because it implies your humans rights and worth is something up for democratic debate and potentially is yet another chip on the political bargaining table.
You don't have to be an adherent to natural law (I'm not) to feel or believe in that. No so-called "Bill of Rights" should demand that other private entities ought to give you special privileges or concessions based on some mob rule decision. No wonder Democrats so frequently assume that the 2nd amendment means something that it doesn't--they believe (or at least, appear to believe) that rights and apparently human dignity are government-granted...!
Privacy is the ability to protect ones personal information from others - preventing others from accessing information about yourself.
Anonymity is removing information which could identify a person as a specific individual from a group.
These two ideas are close, but subtly different. Privacy can be an absolute concept - preventing information access and use for certain information can be binary: either others can access it or not. Anonymity is almost never absolute: simply knowing a human posted text has anonymity to 1 in about 6.7 Billion(ish). If you know any other information, the degree of anonymity goes down: Posted online: 1 in 2 Billion, in English: 1 in 400million. A male in the US implies 1 in about 190Million. A person who lives a particular zip code: anonymous to about 1 in 20 thousand. Examining the content one exposes: a person in Chicago, who is interested in the Chicago Cubs, and opposes the fare increase -- digging into details like that can make a person anonymous to about 1 in a few hundred with enough work.
Asserting anything about anonymity must include the idea that anonymity is always a sliding scale, and depends a lot on every bit of information a person chooses to put out into the world.
I do *not* think anonymity is a right, nor should we try to enforce it or preserve it. Anonymity is an anachronism in recent human history. People act better when they know they are not anonymous.
Privacy protections on the other hand are very important. Personal information sets, socially defined, that one chooses to protect and chooses to prevent others from being able to access of use once they have it are extremely important, and should be promoted and protected strongly.
If the result or output of a software program is to be used as evidence in court, then the code of that program needs to be made available to the court for analysis.
In 20 years it's going to be a no-brainer that if you're using the output of an algorithm as legal evidence then the algorithm should be up for scrutiny, so I'm not sure why people have difficulty understanding that now (especially as it relates to things like voting machines and breathalyzers).
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Article 1. Any individual shall be able to choose anonymity when posting to Internet sites
I disagree with this. While I do believe in the fundamental right to anonymity, it is totally up to the sites owners to make them anonymous or not. For example, lets say this happened to Facebook, you would be instantly hit by a whirlpool of spam, bots, etc.
I believe you have a right to remain fundamentally anonymous, for example I believe in the right to be able to use temporary anonymous e-mail accounts, the right to use Tor and other anonymity proxies, You should have a right to remain anonymous if you so choose, however sites should have the right to require registration to maintain the sanity of the site. But, similarly allowing anonymous postings on a site should be a right for the owners of the site too.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Numbers 5 and 6, as written, could clash with non-disclosure agreements & similar. For instance if I allow someone to inspect the code for my laboriously-written software for security purposes, I'd like to have a legally binding document with them stating that they're not allowed to hand over my source code to my competitors (or indeed anyone, unless they too sign the same agreement, etc.).
http://makezine.com/04/ownyourown/
5. The Right to publish any information that is true without fear of takedown notices
I have to disagree with this one. Secrets, like military secrets, passwords/key combinations, etc. can be very damaging if revealed. In fact, I would much rather make defamation 100% legal* than give everyone the right to publish classified stuff.
*Not that I have much of a problem with doing that in itself.