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The "Hidden" Cost Of Privacy
Schneier points out an article from a while back in Forbes about the "hidden" cost of privacy and how expensive it can be to comply with all the various overlapping privacy laws that don't necessarily improve anyone's privacy. "What this all means is that protecting individual privacy remains an externality for many companies, and that basic market dynamics won't work to solve the problem. Because the efficient market solution won't work, we're left with inefficient regulatory solutions. So now the question becomes: how do we make regulation as efficient as possible?"
Privacy for individuals. Transparency for state.
It's funny that one could look at this and say the markets don't work. The markets ARE working and that most people don't actually care about privacy.
If people -cared- about privacy, they would be willing to pay for the extra care it takes to ensure that their data is private. But, we live in a world where most people really don't care so much if everyone else knows what they are doing, so long as they are not confronted with it, or misuse the information.
Like, if you told someone at a grocery store that, to get their "club card" savings, the store would know exactly what they bought, they would say, they probably didn't care. Now, if they got a letter from the grocery store saying, "hey, since you like strawberries, you might like our sale on blueberries", they might dig that too. And, if they got junk mail from blueberry and strawberry growers, even that might be ok. But, if they got an email saying, "hey, you are killing humanity because you are eating strawberries and your preference for red fruit makes you some kind of a communist", then they would be pissed off.
Bottom line is, people don't care about privacy, but they do care about having their personal information being used to hurt them. It's pretty much the 5th amendment proposition, writ large and writ everywhere. Nothing is really private, but, you can't have your personal information be used to attack you, and that is what the market reflects.
This is my sig.
Define the ownership of personal data to include the person whom the data applies to.
If I enter into a business relationship with someone else, all the information I provide should be considered to be co-owned by both of us. Any subsequent sharing of that information with a third party should involve both the consent of both of us as well as sharing the proceeds of that subsequent exchange. When the costs of managing such transactions are factored in, far fewer of them would occur.
The idea that anyone complains about the costs of complying with such regulations puzzles me. I mean, I could start a business stealing cars and then complain that the costs of complying with auto theft laws were onerous and harming the profitability of my enterprise. Tough sh*t. Its all based on fundamental property rights. Just because someone has developed a business model based upon a legal oversight doesn't legitimize their complaint when the law catches up and plugs the loophole.
Have gnu, will travel.
Except that "the State" is merely an abstract concept for certain actions of individuals, not some concrete thing that exists independently of any individuals.
Those individuals that comprise "the state" should also have the right to privacy, but not in their profession as public servants. Whatever they do in their jobs should be open for anyone to observe, even if their private lives shouldn't.
Yes, it is.
Transparency for the state means transparency on laws as they are prepared, transparency towards regulatory bodies of those laws, etc... It means that the rules that state officials prepare and their work is fully transparent.
Still, the said officials can retain the full privacy of everything that isn't directly work related (IE. What they do on their time off work, what they do during their lunch breaks, whose photo they have in their wallet and what bodyparts have they pierced...)
State is indeed some concrete thing, independent from individuals. Ideal situation is that state represents the masses but it never represents the individuals.
You have:
SOX, CISP, GLBA, HIPPA as the most expensive for corporations. I can speak to CISP and HIPPA from a professional standpoint. The others I cannot.
CISP compliance has a serious impact in that test environments cannot use raw customer data for testing for banks. Sanitized data must be used in test environments normally. In the event of a product fix that needs to be testing back in a test environment offshore resources for instance cannot have access to those environments and the data must be documented and exist only for a limited time. Pulling 20,000 records for testing for instance may take 4-6 hours pre-CISP but post CISP the sanitization process may push that out to 5-10 hours. If you are attempting to do that process in the evening, with only a 6 to 8 hour window CISP meant that many had to beef up their systems to ensure the process was complete within the window. For smaller banks the costs must have been harsh. Updating software, policies and procedures can easily rack up a 6000 labor hours in the first year.
On average CISP complaince can double the turn around time of a production fix (say 20-60 hours of labor) into 40-80 hours for turn around. YOu have an entire chain of events that fire off and kicking out certain staff due to the existence of customer information takes time with SAPs, VPN connectivity, etc... Great for the customer, I cannot argue it, but expensive.
HIPPA I can speak to growing up in hospitals and clinics as well as painting in those locations part time. Part of the requirement that I see directly is, if I have to paint a clinic or office the clinic staff (not I the painter) has to go through and ensure that ANY AND ALL patient documentation is out of sight prior to me starting. HIPPA has too many "reasonable" language mistakes in it as who defines "reasonable"? The judge? Lawyers? JACO? Who? So paranoia is high with patient data (as it should be.) But getting staff to lock all that up prior to maintenance adds time.
Another hidden factor is space. A clinic now has to try and keep other patients out of ear shot pushing the lobby out farther.
Further segragation of roles and even something as simple as those privacy screens add up. In a typical hospital with 200 computers in it let us say, means at $10 bucks a screen you have $2000 in new expenses.
I've seen a few locations require the inter-office mail couriers to have locked boxes while moving around the facility. Those have to cost at least $350 bucks a box for those.
Now all those HIPPA forms are going to double if not triple the amount of paper you are ordering. Liability and insured communications also increase costs and add delays. More cerified mail goes out now as far as I can see since HIPPA also.
One thing to keep in mind is that ANY GOVERMENT COMPLIANCE that exists is disporotionally expensive to smaller organizations. SOX killed a lot of smaller corporations due to the cost of compliance. The smallest get exemptions, the largest can afford it, it's the mid-size businesses that get crushed.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
If a company wants to reduce its costs for protecting private information, stop collecting the damn stuff in the first place. As a recent example, why do I need to register at a website just to listen to a few bird call recordings? Or give my (fictitious) name and address just to read an article?
"Free market" is an oxymoron. Anyone who believes it can solve all the world's problems is just a moron.
On the other hand, a well-designed market is one of the most effective machines for achieving as close to Pareto-optimal results as anyone has ever found. Well-designed markets are actually able to achieve the state that socialist managers of the economy should be aiming for, and they do it much more reliably and cheaply than socialist managers have ever been able to achieve. And they do this despite having right-wing nitwits on one side who think that any regulatory or legal oversight is somehow a violation of their god-given right to screw people over, and left-wing nitwits on the other side who believe that markets are somehow the agents of satan, rather than just a particularly good social management tool.
It's unfortunate that so many on the left take the right-wing nutjob view of markets seriously, because if you adopt the view of markets as just an ordinary tool of neo-socialist economic management you can find a whole lot of ways to deploy them usefully to achieve efficient allocation of limited resources across the whole economy. Well-designed markets can't solve all the world's problems, but neither can anything else, and markets have a long history of solving problems more effectively than most of the alternatives.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I agree in principal but in many areas a single function is made up of several companies or entities. Without the ability to share info, many a business will grind to a halt. What if it is your insurance co. to an emergency ward at the hospital ? Are we going to have to individually authorize every 2 or more entities that actually need to share 'personal' info to conduct business on our behalf ? How is your financial information to be tracked for a credit rating without every company involved getting authorization from you ? What about property ownership and so-called public info that actually contains significant private information ? The fact that I own property at xxx mystreet doesn't insure I live there but it is a good indicator...
IMHO there needs to be 2 sets of rules, #1 that applies to entities you are DOING business with that defines and limits the scope of what, when, where, why and how they can share my info, and #2 a set that prohibits entities that I am NOT DOING business with from seeking, receiving or utilizing any of my personal info without first seeking my permission.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I agree, with additions. When I say that wealth flows upwards, I mean that the wealthy do not create wealth. The poor and middle class create wealth.
And luck has more to do with poverty and riches than any other cause. Look at Bill Gates - his parents were lawyers working for IBM. If he'd been born in poverty, there would never have been a Microsoft. If the guy IBM was going to buy their OS from hadn't gotten sick of IBM's BS and told them where to shove it, PC/M would have been the dominant OS, rather than DOS.
My uncle was rich. He was wounded in WWII, and several lucky things caused his wealth. First, creativity and eye-hand coordination runs in the family. Second, he was in the right place at the right time. If his ship hadn't been bombed, he wouldn't have wound up in the hospital with his future partner, who had lost a leg. When the guy showed his new artificial leg to my uncle, my uncle said "that's a piece of shit, I can make a better leg than that", and did.
His partner was a born salesman. He'd walk into the hospital to talk to the new amputees, who would say something to the effect of "what the fuck would you know about it?" and he'd just roll his pants leg up. Instant sales.
Sure, there was a lot of hard work and sacrifice involved, but if it hadn't been for luck he'd never gotten rich.
The same goes with poverty. Few people are born rich and wind up poor. Even if they squander all their money, they still have contacts. A while back there were radio commercials about Donald Trump's "how to get rich" book, what would he know about getting rich? He was born into wealth!
Do you think anyone would have ever heard of Paris Hilton if her parents weren't the billionaires who owned the hotel chain? What chance does a kid born of illiterate drug addled parents who is shuffled between foster homes have?
If you give rich people money, they'll just squirrel it away -- they already have plenty. But give it to a waitress and she'll spend it, because she has to. Only money that's spent helps the economy.
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