The Gradual Erosion of the Right To Privacy

PeteV writes "There is an interesting article on the BBC's website based around research carried out by Dr. Kieron O'Hara of Southampton University. He points out that under British law, an individual's right to privacy is being eroded by the behavior of those who have no qualms about broadcasting every intimate detail of their life online (via social networking sites) because the privacy law is predicated in part upon the concept of a 'reasonable expectation of privacy.' I think his request 'for people to be more aware of the impact on society of what they publish online' is likely to fall on deaf ears, but in effect what he is saying is that the changing habits of the world-wide community of social networkers is likely to have an effect upon English law and how it is interpreted. Given that the significant bulk of social networkers are American, this might mean 'American behavior' could cause changes in the interpretation of English law (which is not to say English people don't also post their intimate details on Facebook)."

Comments

There will always be privacy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, there will always be privacy. It will just be solely reserved for corporations.

Re:There will always be privacy.

[ibsteve2u]

It is bizarre that corporations are "persons" because of the timing of a SCOTUS clerk's stenography.

But the fact people are losing rights as the corporate "person" is gaining them is hazardous to human health.

Re:There will always be privacy.

[Hurricane78]

Damnit! I wish there were an English version of this song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeGtUSA73_g
It says just what you said, but in a really great way.
Anyone care to translate it?

Freiheit hat mit Deutschland selbstverständlich was zu tun,
sofern man wirtschaftlich dazu was beiträgt.
Manche müssen unfrei bleiben. Keiner ist immun,
wenn er den Zug versäumt, der ihn dann freiträgt.
Wenn er den Zug nicht sieht und alles komplizieren muß,
tja, dann wird es Regeln geben, die er respektieren muß.
Dann wird ihm sein Arbeitgeber vielleicht sagen:
Meine Freiheit muß noch lang nicht deine Freiheit sein.
Meine Freiheit: Ja! Deine Freiheit: Nein!
Meine Freiheit wird von der Verfassung garantiert,
deine hat bis jetzt nicht interessiert.
Meine Freiheit heißt, daß ich Geschäfte machen kann.
Und deine Freiheit heißt, du kriegst bei mir einen Posten.
Und da du meine Waren kaufen mußt, stell ich dich bei mir an.
Dadurch verursacht deine Freiheit keine Kosten.
Und es bleibt dabei, daß meine Freiheit immer wieder meine Freiheit ist.
Deine Freiheit bleibt meiner einverleibt.
Und wenn ich meine Freiheit nicht hab, hast du deine Freiheit nicht.
Und meine Freiheit wird dadurch zu deiner Pflicht.
Und darum sag ich dir: Verteidig' meine Freiheit mit der Waffe in der Hand
und mit der Waffe in den Händen deiner Kinder!
Damit von deinen Kindern keines bei der Arbeit je vergißt, was Freiheit ist.
Meine Freiheit sei dir immer oberstes Gebot.
Meiner Freiheit bleibt treu bis in den Tod.
Wenn dir das vielleicht nicht logisch vorkommt, denk an eines bloß:
Ohne meine Freiheit bist du arbeitslos.
Ja, Freiheit ist was anderes als Zügellosigkeit.
Freiheit heißt auch Fleiß, Männlichkeit und Schweiß.
Ich werd dir sagen, was ich heutzutag als freiheitlich empfind:
Die Dinge so zu lassen wie sie sind.
Drum ist in jedem Falle meine Freiheit wichtiger als deine Freiheit je.
Meine Freiheit: Yes! Deine Freiheit: Nee!
Meine Freiheit ist schon ein paar hundert Jahre alt.
Deine Freiheit kommt vielleicht schon bald.
Aber vorläufig ist nichts aus deiner Freiheitsambition,
du hast noch keine Macht und keine Organisation.
Ich wär ja dumm, wenn ich auf meine Freiheit dir zulieb verzicht,
drum behalt ich meine Freiheit. Du kriegst deine Freiheit nicht. Noch nicht!

Re:There will always be privacy.

[Aczlan]

Google translate says that it means the following in english:
Freedom has to do with Germany, of course,
what to if one contributes what economically.
Some must remain unfree. No one is immune,
if he missed the train, which freiträgt him then.
If he does not see the train and everything must be complicated,
well, then there will be rules that he must respect that.
Then he, his employer may say:
My freedom must not be still long your freedom.
My freedom: Yes! Your Freedom: No!
My freedom is guaranteed by the Constitution,
thy has not so far interested.
My freedom means that I can do business.
And your freedom is, when you get me a job.
And since you have to buy my goods, I introduce yourself to me.
Thus your freedom does not incur costs.
And it remains true that my freedom is my freedom again.
Your freedom is in my incorporated.
And if I have not got my freedom, you do not have your freedom.
And my freedom becomes your duty.
And that's why I tell you: Defenses have my freedom with a gun in his hand
and with the weapon in the hands of your children!
Thus, none of your children at work ever forget what freedom is.
My freedom is always your top priority.
My freedom remains faithful unto death.
If you perhaps not logically occur, think of a merely:
Without my freedom you are unemployed.
Yes, freedom is something other than licentiousness.
Freedom also means hard work, masculinity, and sweat.
I'll tell you what I as a liberal nowadays sensitive:
The things to be as they are.
Drum is more important in any case my freedom when your freedom.
My freedom: Yes! Your Freedom: No!
My freedom is already a few hundred years old.
Your freedom may come soon.
But for the moment nothing is out of your Freiheitsambition,
you have no power and no organization.
I'd be stupid if I am on my freedom for your sake disclaimer,
drum I'll keep my freedom. You do not get your freedom. Not yet!


Aaron Z

Re:There will always be privacy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like Intellius' new service allowing people with mobile devices to run a background check on anyone they bump into from their mobile phone.

It's repulsive. Pretty soon we'll all be running around judging each other based on the spewage from some giant database. Intellius' DateCheck is just another example of how we're degenerating as a society. It's already become common practice for people to do background checks for employees, why not the person you meet in a bar?

It's just ridiculous.

Re:There will always be privacy.

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to... judging people by their smile? judging people by how charming they are? Judging people by how well put together their outfit is? Slashdotters would reap the greatest rewards from these kind of systems.

Re:There will always be privacy.

[Ethanol-fueled]

Slashdotters would reap the greatest rewards from these kind of systems.

Exactly. I'd be more likely to befriend somebody if they had a few charges of disorderly conduct or assault. They would most likely be much more interesting and would be a good person to have my back in a fight.

Unlike nosey judgemental weenies like you.

Re:There will always be privacy.

[uuddlrlrab]

...

Wat?
Could someone who actually speaks German handle this, instead of Google Mistranslate?

Re:There will always be privacy.

[BrokenHalo]

Now here's a suggestion for Google: rather than pissing folks off by putting billboards on StreetView, thet could try constructing a translator that actually respects grammar rules for both languages. I know it's not easy, but these people are supposed to be among the smartest in the world. So here's an opportunity for them to prove it.

Re:There will always be privacy.

[mlnease]

It gets better: What isn't mentioned in ratical.org's David Korten quote is that the "court reporter" who was the author of the headnote cited was Bancroft Davis, retired president of the Newburgh and New York Railway Company (Southern Pacific Railroad was the defendant in the case) among other things including judge and lawyer. Just doing a little volunteer work, I reckon...

Re:There will always be privacy.

[Anonymous Coward]

... and the government.

Re:There will always be privacy.

[ibsteve2u]

A lot of people like to think that "Business-with-a-capital-B" (in reality, the people behind them) has only "gone bad" of late. But the reality, as you point out, is that they have been working to undermine our Constitution and the rights and well-being of the American people for well over a century. Successfully, too, with only a few minor setbacks, most notably during the Presidencies of FDR, LBJ, and JFK.

Yet regardless of American history and the nation's current reality, too many still see the experience of "Business people" as being invaluable to the governing of our nation.

And that is true - but only if you can find a way to eliminate those who would warp government into being the tool of "Business-with-a-capital-B", which is the situation this nation has permitted itself to become entangled in.

Again, as your comment points out.

Re:There will always be privacy.

[mlnease]

Hi Steve,

Yeah, nothing new--a lot older than a century eh?

"...This fact is made evident by an examination of the interests of these men who made up the Constitutional Convention of 1787. There were fifty-five delegates present in the Convention. A majority were lawyers; most of them came from towns; there was not one farmer, mechanic or laborer among them; five-sixths had property interests. Of the 55 members, 40 owned revolutionary scrip; 14 were land speculators; 24 were money-lenders; 11 were merchants; 15 were slave-holders. Washington, the big man of the Convention, was a slave-holder, land speculator and a large scrip owner.

"Jefferson was in France!

"The Constitution, as framed by the Convention, says nothing about the rights of man. It contains no guarantee of free speech, of free press, of free assemblage, or of religious liberty. It breathes no single hint of freedom. It was made by men who believed in the English theory, that all governments are created to protect the rights of property in the hands of those who do not produce it.

"...the Constitution, as drawn up by the Convention, was made to protect the rights of property rather than the rights of man..."

Triumphant Plutocracy: The Story of American Public Life from 1870 to 1920
By Sen. Richard Franklin Pettigrew [Ret.], 1922
In Public Domain

Re:There will always be privacy.

[ibsteve2u]

lolll...yes, indeed; same old same old. Still, I am concerned by today's right, as I hear a lot of "That isn't in the Constitution - therefore we should not be doing it!" and "This is a Republic, not a democracy!" from them.

That suggests to me that they wouldn't hesitate to abrogate the Bill of Rights in order to ensure that he who has the most property - the most wealth - dictates the way that our government is run, and who shall benefit from it.

Not a very comforting scenario, given that I am well shy of the $100 million or so in net worth that it takes to be significant among the right these days.

Re:There will always be privacy.

[mlnease]

Agreed. Of course the original 'Right Wing' was, most basically, in favor of the untrammeled power of the monarchy, the aristocracy and the church. The history of The Enlightenment and of The Left is that of resistance to those powers and the promotion of egalitarianism (with significant deviations by coercive utopians, of course). It seems to me that the only difference today is that The Corporation has replaced the monarchy and the aristocracy--by any other name it remains fundamentally hostile to democracy and (and so naturally to the Bill of Rights and so on). The fact that the scale of this dispute is now global doesn't, as you suggest, bode well for the little guy. If successful the right will undo the New Deal, the Bill of Rights and The Enlightenment (of course they've already gone a long way toward undoing the latter two in the U.S. just in the last decade). No overarching agenda or conspiracy is necessary as The Right is historically and fundamentally opposed to the underlying principles of all of the above.

Logic fail

[girlintraining]

If this argument was "Well, all my neighbors steal cars, so it's okay if I steal cars too," people would immediately point out how broken that is. But when it's about privacy, suddenly that doesn't apply?

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot?!

The difference here is that we're giving this information to people by choice -- people we know. Our friends, family, and acquaintances. But the only way to do that is to have a central authority to proxy that exchange. The problem is that this central authority abuses its power and -- even worse -- that the government wants its hands in everything as well. It should require a warrant because although a billion billion people might have access to the data, that doesn't mean you gave permission to the next guy.

How f***ing hard is it to understand this? This isn't about privacy -- this is about permissions and how we construct social spaces online. The government's got no right installing bugs in my house without a warrant, so why the hell should it be any different in a digital space than in a physical one?

Answer: Because they're taking advantage of the fact that it can't be seen and nobody understands how it works. It's that simple. No complex intellectual arguments required -- they're doing it because nobody's going to stop them.

Re:Logic fail

[maeka]

If this argument was "Well, all my neighbors steal cars, so it's okay if I steal cars too," people would immediately point out how broken that is. But when it's about privacy, suddenly that doesn't apply?

You're comparing apples to oranges.

Theft is clearly defined in law.
Privacy invasion's definition hinges upon "reasonableness" in many places.

So, no, that doesn't apply.

Re:Logic fail

[girlintraining]

Theft is clearly defined in law. Privacy invasion's definition hinges upon "reasonableness" in many places.

If we're going to say that theft of a person's physical property and theft of a person's intellectual property are equivalent (as the law leans towards), then it's no small leap to say a person's privacy is nothing more than a license to that intellectual property. And as such, entitled to the same protections as physical property. Thus, theft and privacy violations are roughly equivalent.

Re:Logic fail

[maeka]

If we're going to say that theft of a person's physical property and theft of a person's intellectual property are equivalent (as the law leans towards)

It does?
Or are you comparing severity of punishment while ignoring the difference between criminal and civil statues?

then it's no small leap to say a person's privacy is nothing more than a license to that intellectual property.

You're right, it's a large leap.

And as such, entitled to the same protections as physical property. Thus, theft and privacy violations are roughly equivalent.

Your arguments (at least those I witness on Slashdot) normally do not rely on such acrobatics. I'll assume you have a better argument which doesn't build upon so much shifting semantical sand, but were rushed and didn't have a chance to elaborate fully?

Re:Logic fail

[poopdeville]

Except that the law explicitly does not work how you seem to think it does.

If you do something in public, you have no right to privacy with regards to that act.

You only have the right to privacy where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. The reasonable expectation bit is the relevant one here, since "reasonable" changes over time.

You will also note that the "intellectual property" you seem to be conflating here doesn't even exist as a licensable type of property. Are your personal details copyrightable? Nope. Patentable? Nope. A trademark? Perhaps, but it's not exactly private. Trade secrets? Plausibly, but trade secrets don't get any protection from law.

Re:Logic fail

[blahplusplus]

"Thus, theft and privacy violations are roughly equivalent."

No they are not, in the real world today privacy is almost impossible unless you have lots of $. Every financial transaction you make, every bill paid, and just existing in the world means you have hardly any privacy. With sattelites pointing down from above, hidden camera's in all your places of business, just what kind of privacy do you think you have NOW? All one has to do is go around collating all that public information should someone with enough money or power want it.

I agree with the guy from Sun who said privacy is pretty much dead, those who have the money and the means know this.

Also lets not forget the contestability of intellectual property (patents being overturned, etc) information is non-rivalrous and non-scarce, and you're broadcasting it all the time (even unintentionally) property is usually only justified by scarcity and by power of commercial interests.

Re:Logic fail

[ceoyoyo]

The law seems to rely on "a reasonable expectation." My reasonable expectation of privacy in my home with the blinds drawn isn't affected by my neighbour's penchant for posing nude in front of her open window. If I post details of myself online for everyone to see I shouldn't have any expectation of privacy whether or not there's a horde of others doing the same. If I take basic precautions to restrict access to that data (such as checking the box on Facebook that asks Facebook not to share my information with everyone) then I DO have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Re:Logic fail

[Smegly]

If this argument was "Well, all my neighbors steal cars, so it's okay if I steal cars too," people would immediately point out how broken that is. But when it's about privacy, suddenly that doesn't apply?

Exactly. It also does not apply when the majority of the neighbors all download content online - that makes them all evil thieving pirates. Because of course there is absolutely nothing wrong with the copyright laws and their never ending extension periods and stealing from the public domain without giving anything back.
Of course, loss of privacy suits the aims of the establishment, while downloading does not - you don't have to look very hard to find a large chunk of laws that serve the business interests of those who payed to have them put in place.

Re:Logic fail

[MarkvW]

You state that the government is going to do something "because nobody's going to stop them."
In the same argument you state "The government's got no right" to do that thing."

If NOBODY is going to stop them, then the government has the right to act because (as you say) nobody is going to oppose the government.

Take some responsibility,PLEASE.

Re:Logic fail

[AnyoneEB]

The difference here is that we're giving this information to people by choice -- people we know. Our friends, family, and acquaintances. But the only way to do that is to have a central authority to proxy that exchange. The problem is that this central authority abuses its power and -- even worse -- that the government wants its hands in everything as well. It should require a warrant because although a billion billion people might have access to the data, that doesn't mean you gave permission to the next guy.

Agreed, but, then again, it seems like a much better solution is to get rid of the central authority. It is not really needed. It is just easier.

Re:Logic fail

[mdwh2]

If we're going to say that theft of a person's physical property and theft of a person's intellectual property are equivalent (as the law leans towards)

The law does not say that. Thankfully we're not quite at the stage where what the RIAA say is law.

Re:Logic fail

[Urza9814]

When you post something on facebook, you don't just give that information to the people you are friends with, you also grant facebook permission to use that information. And if they want to then give that information to the police, that's their right. Just like if you tell your friend something and they go and tell the cops, that's perfectly fine also.

Re:Logic fail

[Anonymous Coward]

The government's got no right installing bugs in my house without a warrant, so why the hell should it be any different in a digital space than in a physical one?

Facebook, MySpace, Slashdot, et al. are not your home. They are the digital equivalent of a privately owned public space. What you do (post) has no reasonable expectation of privacy.

Re:Logic fail

[Anonymous Coward]

But the only way to do that is to have a central authority to proxy that exchange.

No, I get on quite fine by talking (you know, by moving my lips) to my friends. If you don't think it's worth retelling a story a few times, then you just don't deserve to have friends.you should maybe find some real friends.

Re:Logic fail

[girlintraining]

I'll assume you have a better argument which doesn't build upon so much shifting semantical sand, but were rushed and didn't have a chance to elaborate fully?

Sorry, I got nothin'. Running these websites isn't free, and once they get big and popular (which increases their usefulness), some company swoops in and turns it into a profit center. In the process, anything that doesn't have a value (your privacy, artistic merit, etc.) is destroyed. This model epitomizes the history of the internet at both the micro and macro level -- all this wonderful diversity and innovation eventually reduces to profit-oriented behavior. The thing that gives the internet its strength -- lack of a central governing authority, is also its biggest weakness because it results in lowest-common denominator value systems becoming the dominant force.

There isn't really an ethical mandate to prevent this behavior, and certainly not a legal one. It's hard to argue for privacy rights because it is a complex issue; It is difficult to come up with simple arguments, and evoke an emotional response from people. As a result, while everyone agrees privacy rights should exist, nobody can define them or present a unified front in advocating them -- what little effort is directed towards the problem is entirely and swiftly dissipated by economic considerations.

I have no easy answers -- I just have a strong feeling that this behavior should be opposed. That feeling is based on my life experience that unbridled economic exploitation results in the destruction of public resources. In this case, the internet is the public resource.

Re:Logic fail

[maeka]

and I think it comes back down to the question someone else asked in this thread earlier:
What expectation of privacy does one reasonably have for information they have shared publicly?

I don't feel it's a complex issue - I honestly think it is black and white - you chat about or do X online (outside those arenas explicitly protected) and you need to know X is no longer private by any definition. This is no different than in the physical world.
The only thing complex will be convincing people of this fact.

Re:Logic fail

[girlintraining]

What expectation of privacy does one reasonably have for information they have shared publicly?

That question is improperly phrased -- of course, nobody would have an expectation of privacy when the information was intentionally and willfully shared with the world. It's like setting 0644 permissions: Anyone with access can see it. The problem is, a lot of people seem to think that what's 0640 is really 0644, to frame it in a way slashdot readers can understand.

When I post something on Facebook as an average user, my expectation is that the information posted there is only visible to people I have approved as a friend. In this regard, the information is private: Only those people should be able to see what I post, my pictures, etc. The only thing most people want available to the world at large is their name, picture, and e-mail so other people they may have known can find them. Unfortunately, much more than that is usually available -- and sometimes the re-release of that information isn't even within their control. The company can also access that information, aggregate it, and re-sell it to a third party. People don't expect that, but it's right there in the fine print of they care to look.

In an age where everything you install pops up several warning boxes, license agreements, etc., there's a real loss of impact. So you either have users afraid to do anything with their computers out of fear of breaking it, or users who disregard all warnings because there's so many and they've tuned it out. Privacy notices and the like are the same way.

It's like driving without your seatbelt -- you can do it for years and years and never think anything of it... Until the moment before impact when you realize how stupid it was to have ignored it up until now. Privacy is like this too -- nobody pays attention until something surfaces that has a real, tangible impact on their lives. Like being outed to your family because your netflix queue data was shared in some contest and was insufficiently anonymized. Or an employer asking about those photos some guy posted of you at that party where everyone else was drinking. Nobody, security expert or joe average, sees these kinds of things happen until they hit you right in the face. By then, it's too late. But what's the alternative? Exclude yourself from society -- live under a rock? Never post anything online, never buy anything online, just passively watch it like TV behind layers of anonymization proxies?

The problem is that people's "reasonable expectation" is that they won't be hurt -- and that they're in control. Neither of those things are true. What would you have them do? Live under a rock... or twist in the wind, hopeful that the next privacy catastrophe happens to somebody else, hiding behind statistical probabilities?

Re:Logic fail

[selven]

1) The law leans toward physical property infringement and intellectual property infringement being equivalent? Really?

2) The point of IP law is to encourage people to release works to the public. Using IP to protect information you never intend to release is a corruption of that purpose and IP should most definitely not be used that way.

Re:Logic fail

[apez1267]

its true , if i steal a cd i have to pay for it and i may get a warning but if torrent a song i have to pay 16000 for piracy

Re:Logic fail

[maeka]

The question is no more phrased improperly than the expectation of privacy on Facebook which flies in the face of the explicit terms of service.
This is a problem of education, nothing more.

Re:Logic fail

[fyngyrz]

When I post something on Facebook as an average user, my expectation is that the information posted there is only visible to people I have approved as a friend. In this regard, the information is private

That's exactly correct. It is important to understand what privacy actually is.

Re:Logic fail

[Hognoxious]

Compare women's clothing now with the 1960s, the 1920s and the 1880s. What's indecent in one era is acceptable in another. Why? Because when enough people do it, it becomes the de-facto norm.

From a legal POV "reasonable" means what most people do or accept, and obviously that varies from time to time and place to place.

Re:Logic fail

[girlintraining]

The question is no more phrased improperly than the expectation of privacy on Facebook which flies in the face of the explicit terms of service. This is a problem of education, nothing more.

That's shifting responsibility. It makes more sense to change the legislation and spend a small amount on enforcement and compliance actions against corporations and groups that routinely handle large amounts of personal data. Education is expensive, large fines and public trials are a lot cheaper.

Re:Logic fail

[Kirijini]

It's hard to argue for privacy rights because it is a complex issue; It is difficult to come up with simple arguments, and evoke an emotional response from people. As a result, while everyone agrees privacy rights should exist, nobody can define them or present a unified front in advocating them

"Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person, and for securing to the individual what Judge Cooley calls the right "to be let alone." Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that "what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops."

...

Of the desirability -- indeed of the necessity -- of some such protection, there can, it is believed, be no doubt... The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual; but modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury.

...

The common law secures to each individual the right of determining, ordinarily, to what extent his thoughts, sentiments, and emotions shall be communicated to others. Under our system of government, he can never be compelled to express them (except when upon the witness stand); and even if he has chosen to give them expression, he generally retains the power to fix the limits of the publicity which shall be given them... The right is lost only when the author himself communicates his production to the public, -- in other words, publishes it. It is entirely independent of the copyright laws, and their extension into the domain of art. The aim of those statutes is to secure to the author, composer, or artist the entire profits arising from publication; but the common-law protection enables him to control absolutely the act of publication, and in the exercise of his own discretion, to decide whether there shall be any publication at all.

...

...[t]he protection afforded to thoughts, sentiments, and emotions, expressed through the medium of writing or of the arts, so far as it consists in preventing publication, is merely an instance of the enforcement of the more general right of the individual to be let alone. It is like the right not be assaulted or beaten, the right not be imprisoned, the right not to be maliciously prosecuted, the right not to be defamed. In each of these rights, as indeed in all other rights recognized by the law, there inheres the quality of being owned or possessed -- and (as that is the distinguishing attribute of property) there may some propriety in speaking of those rights as property. But, obviously, they bear little resemblance to what is ordinarily comprehended under that term. The principle which protects personal writings and all other personal productions, not against theft and physical appropriation, but against publication in any form, is in reality not the principle of private property, but that of an inviolate personality."

Samuel Warren & Louis Brandeis, The Right to Privacy, 4 [Harvard Law Review] 193 (1890).
Full text here.

Re:Logic fail

[cayenne8]

"The difference here is that we're giving this information to people by choice -- people we know. Our friends, family, and acquaintances. But the only way to do that is to have a central authority to proxy that exchange."

Wow..I guess people didn't keep up, and interact with people BEFORE social networks, goodness, how did we every survive as a species before the age of the internet?

Oh, that's right...phone calls, snail mail....gasp...seeing people in person.

No, it wasn't instantaneous (well, phone calls are)...and no, people didn't as a rule tell you all about every bit of minutiae they did with their lives every waking minute.

On the other hand.....that was a good thing!!

Don't get me wrong...I'm no luddite, but, I do think staying off the social network thing is a small price to pay for retaining a bit of privacy. I don't do facebook, etc....and I've not missed out on anything with friends and family all across this country in the least bit.

Re:Logic fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if you don't have prior convictions and are not living in california.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_petty_theft

Re:Logic fail

[Anonymous Coward]

"a lot of people seem to think that what's 0640 is really 0644"

That is a perfect analogy!

Ha! You leave me out of this.

[ScrewMaster]

. Given that the significant bulk of social networkers are American

That's probably true, but I, for one, do not post the intimate details of my life on the Internet. Mainly that's because, as an adult, I have an awareness of consequence (having suffered through enough such consequences over the years to have gained an appreciation of the power of my own stupidity.) Nevertheless, that Facebook/MySpace phenomenon is largely an expression of childlike behavior on the part of many of those users. Eventually, they'll grow up and wonder "what the Hell was I thinking?!". Or maybe they won't: some people are just stupid after all.

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[maxume]

Alternatively, the things you call consequences may simply disappear.

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[ScrewMaster]

Alternatively, the things you call consequences may simply disappear.

Not likely. You know the old saying, "Friends come and go ... enemies accumulate." Anything you post online can and will be used against you if someone thinks they'll benefit from it. Thinking otherwise is foolish. The Internet has not changed human nature, if anything, it's amplified some of the worst aspects of it.

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[maxume]

Sure, but the set of things that society uses to judge is also constantly in flux.

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[Anonymous Coward]

>That's probably true, but I, for one, do not post the intimate details of my life on the Internet.

Here's a quick 5 minute google search, knowing nothing about you but your slashdot userid. I didn't try crossreferencing to see if any of this information is right; I'm only interested in seeing where it lead.

You father was a physicist and electronics engineer. He lived in/around Bethesda, MD when you were growing up. You are most likely 55 to 65 years old. You lived in Illinois for a long time -- probably over 20 years. You ran a BBS in the mid-90s, shut down in 1995.

Your first name is Jim, last initial is K.

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[khallow]

Doubtful. There is the delicate art of hypocrisy to consider here. Even if both of us have party photos up on Facebook, if I don't like you, then in many environments those photos provide me with ammunition to insult your reputation, perhaps even get you fired or discredited. There'll always be some reason why their activities were incomparable (the beer bong was classier, besides it was in my younger days, a full three weeks ago).

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[Anonymous Coward]

What can you find out from my username?

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[maxume]

I guess, but it has been 17 years since we had a president that did not admit to recreational drug use (and Bush Sr. probably was not a teetotaler).

At least the discomfort of losing the job would be offset with the not working for a hypocrite anymore.

(I'm sure I am a hypocrite, but I don't think it is awesome, and you would have to think it was pretty awesome to fire someone for doing something you also did)

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, folks who are tech savvy and have been around the Internet for a number of years - have probably already learned this lesson. I look back on some of the things I posted to Usenet and cringe - even worse is the fact that it's all still there through Google (and I'm talking late 80s). So I wouldn't be too sure about there not being consequences in the future.

Nowadays, I tend to keep absolutely everything private - or use a handle/anon if needed. If I need to contact an old friend, then I'll contact them privately.

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[poopdeville]

You post on 4chan and like a gimpy teddy bear.

Right? Right? Am I right?

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[ScrewMaster]

Sure, but the set of things that society uses to judge is also constantly in flux.

True ... and that might very apply in the case of a school or an employer that looks up your MySpace page (i.e., a picture of you drunk at a party with a big mug of beer in your hand.) Social norms do change. However, that doesn't apply when it comes to identity thieves, or example. What about reporters trying to dig up dirt on you while you're running for political office? There are lots of ways personal info can come back to haunt you.

Matter of fact, it can work the other way: activities that might be socially acceptable while you're posting them can become less so in the future. Like we've agreed, things change, and such changes are rather unpredictable.

So you never know, and like I said, anything you post online is a potential liability. Is posting highly personal data on a fundamentally untrustworthy Web service for the purposes of social interaction worth the potential future costs? Many think so now (or those sites wouldn't be so popular) but whether they will feel the same way five or ten years down the line is another story.

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[maxume]

An aside:

I think we should stick to calling them fraud artists, I don't become less me when someone else chooses to impersonate me (I think that financial institutions have been quite happy to encourage people to think of themselves as the victims when accounts are opened using fraudulent details; individuals certainly face most of the consequences, but those consequences are coming from the banks and credit bureaus, not the fraudster, the fraudster is ripping off the institution, not the individual).

I certainly agree that people should be thoughtful when posting information to public and semi public systems, but I also do not think that the majority of those people are going to face *any* difficulty from those activities, let alone difficulties having a major impact on the course they want their lives to take.

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[Montezumaa]

Yeah, I have never understood why people choose to stupidly post everything they are doing or thinking on these "social networking sites". If people would adopt the stance that no one can be trusted to keep a secret, then people would not run into situations where they lose their jobs, or bomb on an interview due to running naked down a street and posting the video on Facebook or PedoSpace.

Yeah, it may seem humorous at the time, but posting stupid shit on the internet will always bite you in the end. It is similar to picking the wrong spot to bury a dead hooker. We have all been there at least once or twice...except for me...just saying...

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[TheRaven64]

Which doesn't detract from his point; things that you're perfectly happy with everyone knowing about now can easily become things that you want to keep private later. Think about all of the people in the USA who donated money to charities that helped the soviet victims of Nazi aggression during World War II...

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[ScrewMaster]

but I also do not think that the majority of those people are going to face *any* difficulty from those activities

Probably not, if nothing else from the anonymity afforded by the sheer number of people participating in those activities. But if you ask those that do get hit, they'll probably feel differently. In any event, this is just another one of life's little tradeoffs: the perceived benefits of social networking vs. the very real risks of engaging in those activities. Personally, there's nothing that I would gain from having a Facebook page, consequently any risk > 0 is too much. But that's just me.

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[maxume]

I don't either, but it isn't strictly due to resistance, some of it is social passivity and things like that.

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[ScrewMaster]

and Bush Sr. probably was not a teetotaler

Good heavens, you're not one of those "alcohol is a drug" types, are you? Seriously, you're right about that: anyone that has a problem with marijuana had better have at least as big a problem with alcohol. The fact that alcohol is the traditionally-accepted form of psychotropic self-abuse in most Western cultures doesn't make it any less of a drug. Other societies have different drugs of choice, drugs that are permissible only because of a history, a tradition, that makes them okay. Some cultures look upon alcohol consumption as being just as big a transgression as America's government currently perceives pot, for that matter.

Frankly, I never much cared for Bill Clinton, but I also didn't much care that he had smoked some weed once. Some people were pretty upset about that at the time, as I remember. Nor, for that matter, was George Bush Sr. an alcoholic if he had a glass of wine at dinner.

George Bush, Jr. ... well, I think most of us would agree that he was smoking something.

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[ScrewMaster]

I don't either, but it isn't strictly due to resistance, some of it is social passivity and things like that.

Oh, sure. I'm an old fart compared to the bulk of Facebook users. My life works well enough, and everyone that needs to know anything about me already does. Facebook wouldn't add much to that, at this point.

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[The End Of Days]

You don't have to have a problem with a drug to consider it a drug. Try not to imbue too much meaning that doesn't actually exist - leave the definition twisting to the professionally dishonest and you'll find that things work out much better on the whole, because it makes their machinations that much easier to spot.

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[ScrewMaster]

You don't have to have a problem with a drug to consider it a drug.

I think you missed my point, got it exactly backwards in fact.

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[The End Of Days]

I picked up on the sarcasm (it would be hard to miss the 'seriously') but you cast drugs in the role of evil with the next few sentences.

It's not so much that I missed your point, I didn't work hard enough to make my own.

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[The End Of Days]

Which is to say I concede my mistake... I'm far too distracted at the moment to be coherent and I should probably stop posting.

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[Hognoxious]

The US has had prohibition before, and it could have it again. Put the college photo of you with a mug of beer in that context.

The courts can't retrospectively punish you, but public opinion or a potential employer could.

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[ScrewMaster]

Huh. Troll?

Re:Ha! You leave me out of this.

[Cro Magnon]

Yikes! I tried my username, and it's even got a picture of me. I knew I should have shaved better!

Isn't it contextual?

[RightSaidFred99]

I think it's obviously true that if you post online _you_ have no reasonable expectation for privacy concerning what you post online. But even if I post my most lurid secrets online but I intentionally keep other data protected on my machine, I implicitly have a reasonable expectation that that _other_ data is secret.

His line of reasoning reminds me of claiming that a rape victim who is promiscuous in her personal life therefore wasn't "raped" because she "wanted it". She can screw every Tom, Dick, and Harry around the block but if she tells Duane "no" and he rapes her it's still rape in every sense of the word.

A reasonable expectation of privacy doesn't mean certain types of information are deemed to be not worthy of privacy protection because everyone else releases the data, it means that by the situations I put myself in and the actions I take can I expect MY data to be private.

Re:Isn't it contextual?

[Kral_Blbec]

Duane? Are you kidding? You have to come up with 4 generic sounding names and you pick Duane??? What about Bob, Joe, John and Mike?

Wait a second... Is YOUR name Duane? Ahhh, I get it. Move along folks, nothing to see here.

Re:Isn't it contextual?

[Anonymous Coward]

Duane? Surely something like Rufus, Rastus, Remus, Toby, Carslisle, Carlton, Hey-You!-Yes-you!, Shackille, Winston or Sambo would have been more appropriate?

Re:Good Morning.

[naeone]

Fuck Myspace. Fuck Facebook. Fuck Twitter. And a special "fuck you" to attention-starved fucks who use any of the above.

this the most reasoned argument I have EVER heard.

Number please!

[flyingfsck]

In the days of yore, it was the girls that ran the telephone exchanges that served up the gossip. Nowadays people publish gossip themselves. The result is much the same though.

Re:Number please!

[ScrewMaster]

In the days of yore, it was the girls that ran the telephone exchanges that served up the gossip. Nowadays people publish gossip themselves. The result is much the same though.

Worse. Now the telephone exchange girls all over the planet are serving up our gossip. Of course, I think they call them "routers" and "Web servers" nowadays.

Re:Number please!

[Hognoxious]

The three fastest ways of transmitting information: telephone, telegram, tell a woman.

The seafood assortment is most excellent, and don't forget to tip your waitress!

They are aware

[Anonymous Coward]

They fact that the outcomes are not what you desire does not prove that people are not aware of the privacy implications on society.

Some people just can't deal with the fact that people are more boorish, stupid, racist, sexist, or exhibitionist than they personally might approve of.

The collective of mad apes will always behave in a manner that would have us question "just what were they thinking?" And it will never be that if I just show them the facts, they will behave the way I want them. People can be fully informed and knowledgeable and still live a lifestyle I might not approve of. Not behaving the way I want is not proof of ignorance.

Expectation

[forand]

If i post all the intimate detail of my life to any social networking site, even if I only share with 'friends', I do not have a legal expectation of privacy. If I do not choose to share those details the fact that others do should have no effect on what is a 'reasonable expectation of privacy.' I do not see how this would hold up in a court of law. We have had exhibitionists (celebrities) in all societies for some time and yet their open lifestyles do not have an effect others rights.

Re:Expectation

[__aasqbs9791]

I agree with your point 100%, but here's a question for you. What about details about your life that other people post online? Go to a party with a friend, don't drink at all (because you're the DD), someone snaps a photo while your eyes are half closed (which tends to make people look high or drunk), and posts it online because see it as funny (and where the caption may not accurately represent what was really happening). This someone might not even be a friend of yours. For quite a while you might not even know it exists. Especially if you're tagged in it (but even if you're not). I know that is a lot of ifs, but I think it illustrates my point. You might not post all the details, but others might. I haven't read the article yet, but that's what I would be wondering about.

Re:Expectation

[mdwh2]

Yes, exactly. Clearly the article isn't talking about people giving up their own privacy. The Max Mosley case wasn't about someone posting pics of their own S&M scene, and then suing themselves for invading their own privacy, after all...

I haven't read the article yet, but that's what I would be wondering about.

Unfortunately the article talks about various things, and it's unclear what the academic is actually saying, and what's just random additions by the journalists of things she thinks are relevant. But yes, it mentions the Mosley case - the case there was far more of an invasion of privacy than pics at a party on Facebook, but it was the same kind of idea: photos put up by someone of a private scene without your consent, and it being linked with libellous accusations.

Re:Expectation

[Anonymous Coward]

So you do not mind posting how much money you make, where you live, and when you're away for a holiday?

interesting.

Lie on social networking sites

[ickleberry]

Say you are gone on an awsome holiday in Spain, post reasonably well photoshopped pictures of you having a great time over there, pretend to be a member of several societies you have no interest in. When people question you about it just say "sort of lost interest in that a while back"

Add friends by brute force, find randomers, try to add a bunch of their friends, move on to the next randomer and do the same thing. A significant number will accept your request? Why? because most people on those sites are attention seeking whores.

Have several profiles you use for different groups of people (who shall never meet), each with their own collection of random friends and false memories from years spent abroad.

The more charismatic you appear to be on these social sites, the more people you appear to be seen having a good time with the more people will trust you and the more employers will want to hire you. and it won't matter a damn who'se basement you live in and what sort of a van you drive past the local school

If you want you can even provide false status updates, its not like anyone will ever notice except those who deserve to be lead astray anyway. Say you are in Starbucks sipping a caramellate when really you are out hunting with a high-powered rifle or doing some other activity others might not be comfortable with

Re:Lie on social networking sites

[Jeremy Erwin]

If you want you can even provide false status updates, its not like anyone will ever notice except those who deserve to be lead astray anyway. Say you are in Starbucks sipping a caramellate when really you are out hunting with a high-powered rifle or doing some other activity others might not be comfortable with

I didn't want to be a computer programmer, you know. I wanted to be a Lumberjack! Leaping from tree to tree, as they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia....

Re:Lie on social networking sites

[Kral_Blbec]

If I remember correctly Facebook used to require some sort of verifiable email address issued from a school or work domain. They wouldn't accept hotmail/yahoo/gmail accounts specifically so people couldn't easily spam the site like this. I don't know if they still do.

Re:Lie on social networking sites

[girlintraining]

Add friends by brute force, find randomers, try to add a bunch of their friends, move on to the next randomer and do the same thing. A significant number will accept your request? Why? because most people on those sites are attention seeking whores.

So, what you're saying is... do online what stuck-up cheerleader types have been doing for years: Flirt with everyone, lie, cheat, steal, and sleep your way to the top without ever revealing just how shallow you are. GOD I LOVE HUMANITY RIGHT NOW! mutter...mutter...stab.

Re:Lie on social networking sites

[ickleberry]

No, you can use any email account now. Even http://uggsrock.com/. Most current and future facebook users are of the affluent liberal 'put everything in the cloud' type people, it wouldn't be in their interest to block facebook

Re:Lie on social networking sites

[Anonymous Coward]

do online what stuck-up cheerleader types have been doing for years: Flirt with everyone, lie, cheat, steal, and sleep your way to the top without ever revealing just how shallow you are

Too late.

You don't really think you're better than anybody, do you? I hope not. You're dumb as dog shit.

Re:Lie on social networking sites

[Anonymous Coward]

I absolutely know that I am better than a good deal of people.

On average, I have about 44 IQ points om them as well so your last statement is as incorrect as your first implication.

Re:Lie on social networking sites

[The End Of Days]

You know, as a general principle, deriding people who are social doesn't really make you a better person. I get the whole gallant loner nerd ethic. Its basis is as false as the idea of the noble poor.

Re:Good Morning.

[Kral_Blbec]

I've always wondered why that is considered both a grave insult and goal of the highest order. To many it is even their life ambition.

That being considered, I don't think it is so much an insult as it is well-wishes, somewhat like "good luck" or "have a nice day".

There's different things

[obarthelemy]

1- stuff you choose to put online. There may be a bit of an expectation of privacy there (only my friends should see some of my facebook), but even then you're taking the risk to trust a third party to enforce some privacy for you. I'm fairly sure facebook and co commit to NOTHING regarding the safety, privacy... of your data, but that most people do not realize it.

2- stuff you broadcast unintentionally. My brother uses gmail and is into mountain climbing and Canada... all the Google ads on his Mac are about these 2 subjects.I got treated to 2 days of Monster Cables ads last time I looked for a cable (hint for google: once I'Ive bought a cable, these adds become irrelevant). I'm sure most people expect privacy, they do not realize that their every move on the web is tracked. Pretty much like carrying a GPS tracker + mike + being filmed at all times.

3- stuff that gets taken from a private place, be it my PC or my home. full expectation of privacy there, and clearly criminal to take it.

We French have a law (roughly called "IT and privacy) that guarantees us the right to see and amend any data about us retained in computer form. I'm of half a mind to request my file from google, for curiosity's sake.

Re:There's different things

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget 4- stuff other people put online about YOU. (and that's an almost In Soviet Russia joke...)

You're trapped. You can be as careful and cautious all you want about your online privacy, but you can't stop people you know from posting your data online, even if it's just your email address. Just recently I got a facebook invite by email from a friend, and in it were photos of other people I knew but that didn't know him, even though I never participated in any social networking sites. The only thing on the web that can possibly relate me to those people is the plainly visible Cc: field sent by some of them because they dont know any better.

Re:There's different things

[Grumbleduke]

We French have a law (roughly called "IT and privacy) that guarantees us the right to see and amend any data about us retained in computer form. I'm of half a mind to request my file from Google, for curiosity's sake.

Section 7 of the UK's Data Protection Act covers something similar but for any data - not just that held in digital form:

(1)....an individual is entitled—

1. (a) to be informed by any data controller whether personal data of which that individual is the data subject are being processed by or on behalf of that data controller,
2. (b) if that is the case, to be given by the data controller a description of—
   1. (i) the personal data of which that individual is the data subject....
3. (c) to have communicated to him in an intelligible form—
   1. (i) the information constituting any personal data of which that individual is the data subject, and
   2. (ii) any information available to the data controller as to the source of those data,

Effectively this means that any individual is able to have any data on them disclosed to them and there are further provisions for having the data corrected if it is inaccurate. However, the data controller responsible is entitled to charge for providing the data, (possibly planning to prevent mass-spamming of requests). All data controllers are required to be registered with the Information Commissioner's Office which has a database of all the data controllers (that is publicly searchable). That's also the reason why, at least in the UK, if somewhere as CCTV cameras they are legally obliged to have a large sign saying so and making it clear who has all the recordings etc.. The Data Protection Act is an impressively complicated piece of legislation, though, so there are lots of other requirements and get-outs (it consists of 8 pages of raw law and 12 pages of schedules).

Re:There's different things

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if one effectively gives up their privacy by posting something online, what gives the corporations the right to archive it? Yes, that goes for Amazon.com via their Alexa Internet Archive, DejaNews that later got acquired by Google, and any present or future company that somehow archives/caches the data instead of just indexing-only the content.

What that means? Okay, it's online, it gets indexed and a link is provided to it. No company stores it, except for the site it is hosted on. As long as the content owner leaves the content on there, it is okay to link to it. If the content owner takes it down, then hey it's gone.

Alternatively, if a corporation is going to archive content, then they should also be sharing any ad revenues associated with any ads served along with the content, sharing any donations received to help keep the archived content online, etc. You want my content for all eternity? That's an implied contrast you will revenue share for all enternity!

Re:There's different things

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot one:

4- stuff others choose to put online/broadcast about you. YOU might have an expectation of privacy, but people are generally not all that concerned about the privacy of others unless it impacts them in some direct way.

The way this impacts our perception of privacy is that suddenly any place where a facebook addict goes becomes a public space... even if it's in some cabin in the middle of nowhere surrounded by "Private Property, No Trespassing" signs. One tweet from that location, and its geolocation is published, along with what this social network dependent is doing there, and possibly what *everyone else* is doing there.

The erosion is that we can no longer expect those we let into our private lives to be intelligent enough to keep information private.

Re:There's different things

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if one effectively gives up their privacy by posting something online, what gives the corporations the right to archive it?

This is a dangerous comment to post on a site whose members often state that "information should be free" (with the footnote that this doesn't pertain to private information - PINs, SSNs, medical data, basically anything that the holder/s of information don't want public). As for the idea that items should be indexed instead of cached - well, that's well and good, except that the internet is not perfectly symmetrical. If a popular site links to, say, a picture from a podunk website hosted out of someone's basement, that server is going down - hard. But if that other site makes their own copy*, then they can host the load themselves and the webmaster only has to deal with one hit! And what about sites like tineye (which, as far as I'm aware, cache the information for comparison)?

Personally, I think the solution lies in providing the proper tools to enable people to understand privacy and empower them to easily keep things private. There are already privacy tools around (almost all of the popular bots respect robots.txt), the problem is people are posting information on sites which loudly purport to be public (in fact, that's how they attract people). You can't protect people from themselves (and if you think you can you're the biggest fool around), the best you can do is make them aware of the consequences and hope they'll act in their own self interest.

* This is a very grey area. A large site may use other sites' information hundreds of times a day - so even if you imposed statute limitations, there'd either need to be a clause (which cachers could use as a loophole), or no clause, which would severely harm legitimate websites (including probably this site).

Re:Good Morning.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck Myspace.

Fuck Facebook.

Fuck Twitter.

And a special "fuck you" to attention-starved fucks who use any of the above.

People are media whores - Bill Mahr.

We, as a whole, are a society made up of mostly narcissists; whether it is folks who want to be on some reality tv show, the above mentioned websites, or to the losers who have the loud pipes on their motorcycles.

Would a fad for sex in the front yard...

[John Hasler]

...cause me to lose my expectation of privacy in my bedroom? I don't think so. Not even in England.

Re:Would a fad for sex in the front yard...

[CityZen]

I've kind of wondered if the ease of access to pornography has changed people's attitudes with regard to being in porno videos themselves. The recent article about what percentage of teens have participated in "sexting" makes me think that attitudes are indeed changing.

Re:Would a fad for sex in the front yard...

[PitaBred]

Is that a bad thing? I'd rather see rampant sex than rampant violence, personally

Re:Would a fad for sex in the front yard...

[John Hasler]

The two are not, unfortunately, mutually exclusive.

Welcome

[Aceticon]

Dumb, fashion-following, uncritical people fuck it all up for everybody else: Welcome to Democracy in a nation where education is all geared up to turn kids into make tomorrows working drones instead of empowering them as self-thinking and self-opinied individuals.

As a foreigner that lives in the UK, I'm not at all surprised that the greatest assault on privacy and freedom in the whole Western world is hapenning in the country of celebrity culture and political spin.
(the only claim to Cultural prowness that modern Britain has is BBC)

Some people around here do to try to turn their kids into true individuals (and they have my respect for paddling against the tide), but the vast unwashed masses just leave their kids' education as persons to the (mosly cheap and superficial) Tele and a state school system which is so in thrall of Political Correctness and Health & Safety Regulations that kids are not allowed to explore and are taught to not critcise anything or anyone).

This is very much in the best interest of the local politicians (whose kids go to private schools) since unthinking and uncritical people are easier to decieve with Smoke and Mirrors games.

Re:Welcome

[TheRaven64]

(the only claim to Cultural prowness that modern Britain has is BBC)

Really? So you don't rate the Welsh National Opera, the Royal Philharmonic Opera, or the National Gallery as culture, but you do rate the BBC?

Re:Welcome

[Anonymous Coward]

'prowness' is a perfectly cromulent word. Being /., I assume you meant pwnitudinationess.

Re:Good Morning.

[santiagodraco]

Translation:

"I have no friends to link on Facebook and neither should you"

I notice that Dr. O'Hara is not a lawyer.

[John Hasler]

n/t

Re:I notice that Dr. O'Hara is not a lawyer.

[maxume]

I notice that Jack Thompson was a lawyer.

Re:I notice that Dr. O'Hara is not a lawyer.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you would like to read more about him it's easy to find the details of his life online

Re:I notice that Dr. O'Hara is not a lawyer.

[Onymous Coward]

Touché! maxume strikes down an attempted ad hominem with flair.

Re:I notice that Dr. O'Hara is not a lawyer.

[John Hasler]

Observing that a person who is expressing an opinion about a legal matter lacks professional credentials in law is "ad hominem"?

IANAL either. Did I just commit "ad hominem" against myself?

Re:I notice that Dr. O'Hara is not a lawyer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Observing that a person who is expressing an opinion about a legal matter lacks professional credentials in law is "ad hominem"?

You're right, it's not ad hominem, it's just a red herring.

Protip: Privacy is a matter for everyone, not just lawyers. Save your fish for when we're talking about a legal case.

Re:I notice that Dr. O'Hara is not a lawyer.

[Onymous Coward]

When used as an argument against the point, yes.

n/t

Ah, but I will say this: Ad hominem attacks are not entirely without merit. :D

Using Facebook is stupid.

[Organic Brain Damage]

I tried Facebook, but nobody would friend me so I think it's stupid.

Don't see what the big deal is

[ModernGeek]

The things I post on facebook are things I would show to any stranger. I think of facebook as a PR tool, when I post to it, I imagine showing everybody in the world. I would never use it to share anything "secret". If there were pictures I only wanted certain friends to see, I wouldn't use facebook to share them. How hard can this be?

Re:Don't see what the big deal is

[poopdeville]

Well, back in 2002, when I got invited to Facebook, by Facebook, it was billed as a gated social network. It had privacy tools to let you share stuff with specific people. It's easy enough to say that you don't share now. But how do you know rapidshare or whatever you use to share isn't going to spill the beans on what you share? You don't, until they do. And then it's too late.

Re:Don't see what the big deal is

[Hortensia Patel]

The things I post on facebook are things I would show to any stranger. I think of facebook as a PR tool, when I post to it, I imagine showing everybody in the world. I would never use it to share anything "secret". If there were pictures I only wanted certain friends to see, I wouldn't use facebook to share them. How hard can this be?

That's fine, as long as you're the only one in the pictures. If you're not, then either:

a) You diligently consult all the other people about their privacy preferences before posting, or
b) Those other people are suddenly subject to *your* notion of privacy, which may well be a whole lot looser than theirs.

So to answer your rhetorical question: actually, quite hard. In extreme cases, i.e. extreme mismatches between notions of privacy, the more-private are pretty much forced to segregate themselves from the less-private, because they just flat can't trust them.

Re:Don't see what the big deal is

[apoc.famine]

When I tag that picture of the guy laying face down in his own puke "ModernGeek", it gets harder. When someone on Assbook does the same, and you haven't heard of the site, and never go there, it is even worse.
 
If you look at all the pictures taken of me in the last 6 months, 95% of them are me at parties. Why? Because even though I hit a party a month, at the most, 30 other days a month I don't take a picture of me working diligently, acting professionally, performing open heart surgery or feeding starving orphans. If you look through the photos tagged as me in Facebook, they're almost all party photos, despite my minimal amount of partying.
 
It's not what YOU put on sites like this - it's what others put.

If there were pictures I only wanted certain friends to see, I wouldn't use facebook to share them.

Yes, but they might use Facebook, or some other social networking site to share those same pictures.
 
Those of us old and stable with solid friends in good relationships don't have to worry too much about that. But for your average teenager, it's a mire of backstabbing and petty revenges. Add in the rest of the population in messy relationships, with automatic login and openly known passwords, and it's a huge issue.

Re:Don't see what the big deal is

[Anonymous Coward]

That's good... now what about your "friends" on facebook? Do they share your same ethos? Or are they talking about personal relationships and getting high at parties, or about pirating video, or some other ethically questionable/revealing activity?

Despite the fact that we try to keep it out of our court systems, "guilt by association" is embedded into the human psyche. Even if they don't ever mention your name in the private details they choose to reveal, you're still linked to them.

This is why I don't have much of an issue with LinkedIn (EVERYONE is using it as a PR tool), but won't touch most social networking sites with a 10' firewall.

Re:Don't see what the big deal is

[The End Of Days]

Expecting everyone in a group to adopt the privacy seeking of the most paranoid individual would lead to a society of shut-ins. If it bothers you, opt out completely. Go Sean Penn on anyone who takes your picture. Draw your blinds. Just don't wait for the world to consider it rational and want to be the same way.

Re:Don't see what the big deal is

[Hortensia Patel]

Oh, fer crying out loud. I don't know what it is that makes a certain kind of Slashdot poster feel unable to reply to a post until they've mentally rewritten it as a universal prescription and exaggerated everything by a couple of orders of magnitude, but it's kind of annoying. "You know, I quite like cheese." "Oh yeah? OH YEAH? You know what happens if you eat NOTHING BUT CHEESE, ALL THE TIME? Go ahead and become a phlegm-filled greasy artery-clogged spherical travesty of the human form if you want to, pal, but don't expect the rest of us to follow your insane death-by-cheese-panel dictates."

Of course the general population aren't going to put up with Anonymous Hermit Rules, any more than they'd put up with Extreme Exhibitionist Rules. My point was just that preferences can and will vary widely (without anybody necessarily being unreasonable), and I don't think that this is the non-issue that great-GP seems to think.

Look at the dating scene; there's plenty of room in the world for swingers and purity ring wearers and BDSMers and anybody else you care to mention, but without all the conventions that have evolved to minimize embarrassing expectation mismatches, it'd be a minefield. Privacy doesn't really have these conventions yet; there aren't any "don't-tag-pics-of-me" rings or "our-toilet-webcams-post-to-4chan" bars.

Re:Don't see what the big deal is

[The End Of Days]

Oh relax. I just take ridiculous positions for fun. Trolling is the old-fashioned word, I believe. I nerdbait, I crazybait, I argue for kicks - and occasionally I get a great reaction. It's the internet, don't take it so damned seriously.

--- end of the point.

Note to APK: here's another post for you to link in your seemingly unending diatribes against me. What will you do when I abandon this account and move on to yet another one, with a concurrent change in style? I hope you don't implode for lack of an enemy.

I guess this one is also good for whatever other stalkers I've managed to acquire. Seems to be at least two. Please, continue chopping away at my nonexistent credibility. Nothing could hurt me more.

Re:Don't see what the big deal is

[Anonymous Coward]

I just take ridiculous positions for fun.

If you find it entertaining to bait internet strangers then you are probably a child who finds it difficult to engage in intelligent debate. So you vandalize instead. Grow up please.

Re:Don't see what the big deal is

[The End Of Days]

No thanks, I'll go on doing whatever I want. It's not so much that I find intelligent debate difficult. It's that I find it in places other than Slashdot. Most of what goes on here is just pretension and people congratulating each other on sharing opinions under the guise of being the intellectual elite. It's fun to take any self-described elite down a peg.

The commercialization of the net...

[MindPrison]

...is killing our freedom of speech.

When the internet became all too serious, you know...online markets becoming just like your next door store, and online places where you could meet - the government thought it was a good idea to make it mandatory to log everything you say and do, the internet was killed!
The internet used to be a free place - where thoughts and information could flow freely - and it was up to each individual how they processed the data they found - pretty much like in books, but faster, and uncensored by the publishing companies - making the internet a raw - but fair place.

The right to privacy is all about freedom, you have the right to think, say and have an opinion about everything in your life, you have the right to write a diary - and for others to stay out of your business if you wish - but with the "law" getting into the internet - these rights are being gradually destroyed, basically because they're taking a too keen interest in this place (which is essentially your and mine diary fused together).

Apples and ornages

[DerekLyons]

This really has nothing to do with 'a reasonable expectation of privacy'. That principle applies to things you intend to do privately that you wish to keep hidden from a second or third party, not to things you do publicly.
 
If I catch a Peeping Tom at my window (for example) it doesn't matter one bit what I do on Facebook, because in my home I have a 'reasonable expectation of privacy'. Period. If the defense were to bring up my Facebook activities, I would hope the prosecutor would realize that such a defense is no different than smearing a rape victim because she was wearing skimpy clothes or a robbery victim because they left their door unlocked.

Re:Apples and ornages

[Dyne09]

There have been cases where a peeping tom has viewed and even video taped private persons in their homes, and as long as the peeping tom is on public or their own property, they are within their legal right. Performing personal acts in front of an open window that is publicly viewable is akin to posting intimate details online, and the law has upheld this in some cases. "Reasonable Expectation" is still at the whim of who ever makes the law.

Re:Apples and ornages

[phantomfive]

I think the distinction they are getting at here is somewhat more subtle than the distinction between facebook at peeping toms. No one is arguing that because facebook exists now you can look in people's windows.

A crucial point here is that this is in England, which has an entirely different set of priorities than America, I think some people don't realize it. This is why they call it 'American Behavior.' In America, we tend to favor things like freedom, truth, and independence, whereas in England they tend to favor propriety, respect, and order. I am not trying to say either system is better, but each side has made laws that reflect their ideals.

Thus in England laws are arranged so the truth is no defense against slander, and in America individual freedom is so valued that gun rights are protected, with often deadly results. This has been an arrangement England has been happy with for many years, but with the closer international integration being felt everywhere, England is having to confront the changes in society that come along with that.

Re:Apples and ornages

[Anonymous Coward]

If I catch a Peeping Tom at my window (for example) it doesn't matter one bit what I do on Facebook, because in my home I have a 'reasonable expectation of privacy'. Period. If the defense were to bring up my Facebook activities, I would hope the prosecutor would realize that such a defense is no different than smearing a rape victim because she was wearing skimpy clothes or a robbery victim because they left their door unlocked.

Tell that to the guy who was charged with the heinous crime of making coffee in the nude one morning, in his own kitchen, and was seen through a window by a woman and her child who were trespassing on his property at the time.

Re:Apples and ornages

[pongo000]

Thus in England laws are arranged so the truth is no defense against slander, and in America individual freedom is so valued that gun rights are protected, with often deadly results against those who might do harm to others.

There, fixed that for ya. Cites are as close as your Google search textfield.

Re:Apples and ornages

[phantomfive]

Yeah, I knew someone would try to defend their pet viewpoint. Realistically speaking, you will probably go your entire life without being in a situation where you will need to defend yourself with a gun. If you want to have fewer deaths from crime, you'll get significantly better results from improving law enforcement than you will from having guns legal. "America is safer when you don't know who is armed" is purely propaganda.

On the flip side, gun accidents are not a significant issue either. If you really want to reduce needless deaths in America, you will get far better results by getting people to exercise more than you will by outlawing guns.

At its heart the issue really is that some people like guns and want them to be legal, and some people don't like guns and want them to be illegal. In America for various reasons, some valid and some invalid, most people want them to be legal.

Re:Apples and ornages

[ScrewMaster]

Yeah, I knew someone would try to defend their pet viewpoint. Realistically speaking, you will probably go your entire life without being in a situation where you will need to defend yourself with a gun. If you want to have fewer deaths from crime, you'll get significantly better results from improving law enforcement than you will from having guns legal. "America is safer when you don't know who is armed" is purely propaganda.

At heart, I think the entire issue is something of which you have little understanding. That's okay, I suppose ... most Americans don't either. But it's pretty obvious from your post that you haven't really researched the subject. I think that if you did spend some time understanding how the defensive use of firearms (including the most common scenario where not a single shot is fired) regularly averts violence and saves countless lives, you might feel differently. Disarmed societies have not, in spite decades of rhetoric on the subject by gun control proponents of one stripe or another, turned into beatific violence-free Utopias. It would be nice if that were true, but as is usually the case when dealing with millions of human beings ... it's just not that simple. People want easy answers. Politicians like them too, especially if it means extending their authority and adding more government employees to the payroll. Gun control is a simple answer that sounds good (thus making ordinary citizens happy) and re-elects politicians (thus making them happy.) That automatically makes it suspect in my book.

A better solution would be a well-armed and well trained population of gun owners. But that requires making people take responsibility for their ineptness, and elected governments often have a really hard time making that happen. Just look at what passes for a driver's license examination in most States, and we lose far far more people to preventable car accidents that we do to gun deaths. But nobody is really up in arms about "car control.", although if the idea is truly to prevent the violent loss of life they should be.

Gun control is about one thing, and one thing only: a further extension of government power and limiting the individual's ability to resist. I know you obviously won't agree with the basic premise of the Second Amendment, but the truth is that now, more than any other time in our history, are we approaching a time when the Founder's wisdom may become obvious to everyone. Is England different in this regard? Maybe ... but frankly I don't think so. Both countries have overreaching central governments that don't recognize any fundamental limits on their rights to take power from their respective peoples. They're being held in check only by traditions and laws that are both being slowly changed to the detriment of the ordinary citizen. Our Founders foresaw this centuries ago.

Increasing law enforcement will have zero effect upon gun crime. That's because the cops cannot prevent someone from shooting you. The best they can do is pick up the pieces after they cart you off to the morgue. That's the reality of it: more cops don't automatically equal fewer shooting deaths. The only way that I could seen gun control being at all effective is if you allow the police to continuously and randomly search all private residences for weapons, or if the entire population (including criminals) would cheerfully turn in their weapons and never try to acquire more. Maybe.

I don't think I'd want to live in such a society, though.

Re:Apples and ornages

[selven]

http://digg.com/politics/25_years_murder_free_in_Gun_Town_USA
http://www.propeller.com/story/2007/04/17/self-defense-in-switzerland/

The parent's pet viewpoint is entirely justified.

Re:Apples and ornages

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I knew someone would try to defend their pet viewpoint.

You started it with *your* cherry picking of one "pet" example, wanker. It's clearly a topic about which you are completely ignorant. Don't wander into the minefield if you don't want a foot blown off.

Re:Apples and ornages

[Cassander]

At its heart the issue really is that some people like guns and want them to be legal, and some people don't like guns and want them to be illegal. In America for various reasons, some valid and some invalid, most people want them to be legal.

I don't actually like guns but I still very much want them to be legal. As long as guns physically exist, bad people will be able to get their hands on them. Period. Can't put the genie back in the bottle no matter how many laws you pass. As long as bad people have physical access to guns, everyone else needs access to guns to be on equal footing to properly defend themselves. (Though I do agree that most people could use more training on how to properly use their guns, and I would be in favor of mandatory training like what Switzerland does.)

More police is also not an answer. The NRA has used this line so much that it's a cliche now, but that doesn't invalidate the point: "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away." Emergency services can take a life-threatening amount of time to respond. This is why we have privately owned fire extinguishers and first aid kits. Privately owned guns are the same sort of precaution.

Also, another true cliche: "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." Even if you somehow manage to miraculously remove every gun on the planet and remove the knowledge of how to build them from our collective consciousness, people will go right on killing each other with knives and rocks and whatever else happens to be handy at the time. In a world without guns, wheelchair granny cannot defend herself against a thug with a baseball bat. Guns just level the playing field a bit.

The thing that bugs me the most about this issue though (at least in America) is that the liberals, who I usually side with come voting day, are on the side of disarmament. When it comes to electing politicians, why do I have to choose between civil rights and gun ownership? I see private gun ownership as a fundamental civil rights issue. I contribute to the ACLU and the NRA, and I don't understand why more "liberals" don't see it the same way.

Re:Apples and ornages

[phantomfive]

More police is also not an answer

It isn't a matter of having more police necessarily, it's a matter doing better police work. Here is a piece that touches on some of the latest improvements in law enforcement practice. Such changes are much more likely to make a difference for crime than legalizing or making guns illegal would (depending which country you live in). The NRA's line is technically true, but it is mostly irrelevant. Most of us will never be in a position where seconds matter.

Re:Apples and ornages

[sydneyfong]

Last I checked, truth *is* a defense for slander in England.

Politicians view

[gmuslera]

wanting privacy => guilty of something. Maybe for the ones that claim that is true.

Reversal of Reasonable Expectation of Privacy

[WebManWalking]

In the 1960s, police tapped a pay phone in New York City because a suspect was apparently using it for criminal activity. At trial, the prosecution argued that he was in public, so therefore constitutional privacy protections didn't apply, and they didn't need a warrant for the wiretap. But the wiretap evidence was thrown out by the US Supreme Court, on the grounds that, although he was in public, he had a reasonable expectation that the conversation was private. In other words, the criterion of "reasonable expectation of privacy" was used by the court to extend privacy protections into the public realm, not to contract them.

This was apparently treated by the Executive Branch as a loophole, that if they could give the public no expectation of privacy whatsoever, they could wiretap without warrant at will.

Just a little history...

In the US, the fourth amendment does a bit...

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

Your third category, stuff that gets taken from a private place, is protected by the Fourth Amendment in the US: it gives us the right to be free from "unreasonable" search and seizure. Like most of our civil rights, it grew significantly during the Civil Rights era in the middle of the last (20th) century and has had many holes punched in it in the years since. Our Supreme Court was expansionist about such rights in that era in order to stop racist police from abusing power. The problem is most of the expanded civil rights are used the vast majority of the time today to make people go free who are absolutely guilty--the vast majority of arguments about civil liberties are made by drug dealers and criminals, and maybe one in ten thousand are made by honest citizens. These liberties help keep our police forces much more professional than they would otherwise be, but seeing them used to let the guilty go free time and time again makes the Supreme Court slowly carve out exceptions.

Re:In the US, the fourth amendment does a bit...

[selven]

The problem is most of the expanded civil rights are used the vast majority of the time today to make people go free who are absolutely guilty--the vast majority of arguments about civil liberties are made by drug dealers and criminals, and maybe one in ten thousand are made by honest citizens.

You missed all the times when police didn't trash a person's home because the expanded civil rights would have made the evidence all inadmissible, making sure that there's no point in doing it. Yes, the downsides are much more glamorous, but the net effect of these laws is still overwhelmingly positive.

Re:Good Morning.

[John Hasler]

No, but judging by my email I have hundreds of friends on LinkedIn. Even though I have no account there.

Boo-hoo the people have spoken QQ

[redelm]

Most people want fast & free and are less concerned about privacy. This is observable behaviour, and it would be idiotic to expect online corps to hobble their advertising revenue by foregoing user customization. Or courts to ignore admissible evidence.

Some people also seem to positively eschew privacy and want to publicise themselves. Their choice is valid too, but they must accept the consequences as well as the benefits. The interesting thing is that the consequences severity*probability has not scared people yet. This is evidence of a "not-too-horrible" society. Some societies [DDR] have been otherwise.

A bigger question will be to preserve privacy for the minority who opt to keep it. Fortunately, silence cannot be used against you in a [anglo] court-of-law. Unfortunately, nothing can protect you against the expectations of others.

Re:Good Morning.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck Myspace.

Fuck Facebook.

Fuck Twitter.

And a special "fuck you" to attention-starved fucks who use any of the above.

People are media whores - Bill Mahr.

We, as a whole, are a society made up of mostly narcissists; whether it is folks who want to be on some reality tv show, the above mentioned websites, or to the losers who have the loud pipes on their motorcycles.

Even better, if you don't fit that mold they think you are the loser. It doesn't occur to them that you reject this narcissism. No, they just assume that you have failed to be a good narcissist. That is, that you must have never accomplished anything or done anything interesting because if you had, you'd be an exhibitionist too.

That's the mark of all inferior worldviews, I might add. Inferior worldviews don't incorporate an awareness of other ways of being and don't allow for the idea that there may be good reasons for having a different one. It's much more like a mindless "wetware" computer executing social programming and much less like a conscious awareness of different concepts (such as narcissism) and choosing one that suits you. I think it must be that way, because views like narcissism don't fare well in any honest comparison with other available views.

Sir John of MI6

[Max(10)]

"Mainly that's because, as an adult, I have an awareness of consequence (having suffered through enough such consequences over the years to have gained an appreciation of the power of my own stupidity.)"

Sir John, is that you?

"british law" "english people"

[ZERO1ZERO]

So, what does this mean for the other people who live on.in Britain? You know, the Welsh, the Scots, the Irish etc.

Re:"british law" "english people"

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what does this mean for the other people who live on.in Britain? You know, the Welsh, the Scots, the Irish etc.

Wales and Northern Ireland follow English law, Scotland has its own (broadly similar, but with a few very important differences). Ireland is not part of Britain, and has its own court system (although FWIW I believe it is similar to England)

Re:"british law" "english people"

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a Distinction between "English and Welsh Law" and "Scottish Law", i.e. laws in England and Wales are the fundamentally same.

There is a separate Scottish Parliament that has limited powers to legislate in certain areas. Similary there is a Northern Ireland Law.

The United Kingdom Parliament at Westminster covers all these teritories for laws that the regional parliaments do not have authority to legislate.

It's people's attitudes.

[Anonymous Coward]

What I do find interesting is that although I myself have never been a MySpace/Facebook/etc user, I can almost always expect that my likeness will be used there anyway. If a friend takes a photo of me, I can almost be guaranteed that it'll end up on Facebook without my consent, yet at the same time I can't be the luser who stuffs their hand in the camera's lens, or worse, becomes the total social recluse that never comes out of his bedroom. The reason for that is simple: people expect that I am like them, and think it completely acceptable to go posting photos of myself all over the Interwebs.

The erosion of privacy hasn't got anything to do with big government, corporations, or the like - sure, they come in eventually as a result, but ultimately it's people, and more specifically people's attitudes, that are causing the change.

Other people doing it for you

[Anonymous Coward]

What sucks is when other people post TMI about you. My real name and where I lived a few years ago is all over the dang place thanks to me suing and winning, which creeps me right out because it's on tons of law blogs and cited on several .gov sites. It's not exactly sealed information but why make it easy for everyone using Google to find it? It has affected me getting employment because employers think I'm a litigious nut, even though it the case wasn't anything about fair labor or employment.

That's nowhere near as bad as an ex who can't move on publicly posting your nood polaroids out of spite or someone dropping dox because you called them a poopyhead on LJ ten years ago.

Re:Other people doing it for you

[PitaBred]

It'll just take society a while to catch up. Right now we're a bunch of fucking hypocrites, who all do the same things, but expect everyone else to have never done them. We'll reach a breaking point eventually.

Re:Other people doing it for you

[Daniel Dvorkin]

The court system is public by design. When you chose to file suit, you chose to expose certain information about yourself. I'm sorry if you're suffering for it now, but consider that the alternative is a court system where proceedings take place in secrecy. We have a few examples of this already as part of the "War on Terror," and most thoughtful people consider this to be a Bad Thing; you really, really don't want to live in a world where it's the norm.

Re:Good Morning.

[Antiocheian]

Translation of Translation:

"I have no real friends so I am relying on Facebook to cover the deficit."

Metasurvelliance?

[ebusinessmedia1]

I agree that it's very difficult to stop the authorities from piling up so many invasions of privacy that by the time one gets started we have already lost many of those rights.

That said, think about the world we are moving into as described by Bill Joy, then Chief Scientist at Sun Microsystems, in a now-famous essay published in Wired Magazine. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html

Joy's point is that in the near-long-term technologies will be available that won't take huge infrastructure or ultra-sophisticated terrorists to use against us in ways that could be so devastating as to pose a threat to mankind in its entirety, including terrorists.

Joy's article wasn't aimed at the terrorist scene; it was more about the coming onslaught of technology in ways that we had hardly yet imagined.

Yet, implied are factors that plainly lead one to think that the only way to ultimately protect human beings in a largely technologically run, networked environment will be to deploy universal surveillance - and even with that we will face large challenges.

My sense is that the only way through this is Democratic societies will be to deploy what I call "metasurveillance" policies that permit anyone, anytime, to go into the network, log on, and see where one was watched, why, for how long, for what purpose, etc. In other words, perfect transparency.

This is the only way, with the major problem that those who pose threats will also have access, if they are members of an open society that values privacy. It's going to be cat and mouse. The most difficult part of this is going to be keeping those who would do harm away from information that would inform them of their being watched. I don't know if this is possible.

All that said, given where we are headed (read the Joy article, it's still spot on), I don't see any other solutions other than universal surveillance. We are going to have to protect rights along the way, or else we'll end up destroying one of the basic tenets of an open society.

I would love to hear other ideas in this realm, because so far what I see is people (me included) arguing that personal privacy should not be taken away, but intuition and the works of others tell me that privacy will disappear for the reasons that I and others have mentioned.

There was a time when privacy was hard to maintain; think of small village life prior to the industrial revolution. It's only with the rise of large urban complexes that anonymity became nearly ubiquitous. We evolved in small tribal cultures where everyone knew mostly what you were doing, anyway. So, one *could* argue that the anonymity provided by large urban complexity is a new environmental variable that we have yet to adapt fully to, in ways that protect out participation in that environment, including the (urban, networked) environment itself.

The network places us in one, large big "city" - how do we protect that and maintain individual rights? That's the conundrum.

Me Too:

[Anonymous Coward]

I once had a LinkedIn account. Well, I did for all of 6 weeks. Then I realised how much info there was about me that could be used to steal my identity. I deleted it straight away.

I also don't do FaceBook etc or even FriendsDisunited (aparently I hve lots of old school chums who are dying to contact me every day)

I was the victim of identity fraud in 1973 so I know what it is like to have someone impersonate you complete with a forged passport.

All my forum access uses pseudonyms and I have at leat 6 different email addys.

If you tell the workd about every detail of your life then if you get taken for a ride then all I can say is SUCKER. You asked for it

This is Silly

[flajann]

People *choosing* to post details of their lives online does has nothing to do with rights to privacy (or should not). Privacy involves protecting person A's details from being seen/used/compromised by person/institution/agency B.

But if person A elects to make some aspect of his life public, then obviously there is no "expectation of privacy" of the details person A wilfully made public. However, person A may wish to keep other details of his life private, and his rights to do so should not be compromised in any way by those details he made public, sans some illegal activity or intent to do harm to others.

And of course, if something is "illegal", that does not necessarily proffer a waive to one's rights to privacy. It all depends on whether or not the "illegal" thing is justified or not. There are all kinds of bad laws and practices that should be removed.

Re:Good Morning.

[Jedi Alec]

Oi, some of us use Facebook to keep track of our ex-gf's you insensitive clod!

No, I'm not kidding.

A simple cure - if you can't beat 'em...

[Penguinisto]

Incorporate yourself, your belongings, etc. as an LLC.

Yes, it would suck that you have to become a one-man(woman) corporation just to get some privacy, but on the plus side, you can enjoy the same rights as the mega-corps, pay lower taxes (what is it, 15% as opposed to the 28% that higher-end individual earners make?), and enjoy the same skewed laws, but this time in your favor.

On the down side, if a larger corp decides to buy your corp, do you become their slave? (I know, I know... but I can't get the thought out of my head for some reason).

Re:A simple cure - if you can't beat 'em...

[Anonymous Coward]

Become a Corporation sole. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_sole

Its like a LLC but without a board of directors or shareholders.

Re:A simple cure - if you can't beat 'em...

[cayenne8]

Take a look into becoming a S Corporation...that way is a great way to go, especially as a one person corporation.

You avoid the double taxation or a normal corp.....income falls through to personal tax after all write-offs.

Nice thing too..you can save tax money from SS and medicare. You pay yourself a reasonable salary according to IRS definitions...and you only have to pay SS and medicare on that portion of your income. Example, you bring in $100K billed in. You pay yourself $40K salary....you only pay SS and medicare on that $40K. The remaining $60K...you just pay state and federal taxes on. Of course you write off purchases, mileage, etc...from that $60K before it falls through on your personal taxes...so, it is less than that..etc.

Definitely worth looking into, especially if you are a contractor...hey, it is about the only way to keep your hard earned money from U. Sam these days, and I gotta think that SS and medicare taxation is gonna skyrocket soon if congress has its way.....

Re:A simple cure - if you can't beat 'em...

[uuddlrlrab]

As the sole subject of the corporate entity, you are Chief accounting officer, Chief administrative officer, Chief analytics officer, Chief brand officer, Chief channel officer, Chief compliance officer, Chief communications officer, Chief data officer, Chief executive officer, Chief financial officer, Chief information officer, Chief information security officer, Chief knowledge officer, Chief learning officer, Chief legal officer, Chief marketing officer, Chief networking officer, Chief operating officer, Chief procurement officer, Chief risk officer, Chief science officer, Chief strategy officer, Chief technical officer, Chief visionary officer, Chief human resources officer, Board of Directors + Chairman of the Board, all rolled into one. The decisions are all coming from the same place. If you have multiple personality disorder, well, then you have an excuse to worry, since there could be a hostile takeover. Unless, of course, you're the personality taking over, in which case, have a blast, take no prisoners, etc... I'll just be over here...far, far away, over here.

Re:A simple cure - if you can't beat 'em...

[Penguinisto]

...at least the meetings would be short. ;)

Re:A simple cure - if you can't beat 'em...

[Zero__Kelvin]

From the GPs linked article:

"This is the text of the 1886 Supreme Court decision granting corporations the same rights as living persons ..." - [emphasis Added]

"Incorporate yourself, your belongings, etc. as an LLC."

How, exactly, would that be an advantage?

Re:A simple cure - if you can't beat 'em...

[Anonymous Coward]

hey, it is about the only way to keep your hard earned money from U. Sam these days, and I gotta think that SS and medicare taxation is gonna skyrocket soon if congress has its way.....

If you don't like the size of taxation in the US, maybe you should do something about that military? You guys could have a first rate public health care system, first rate schooling, and a first rate social safety net, if that military was reigned in somewhat.

I do appreciate that many people in the US are opposed to a public health care system because they know it will be as good as the US public schooling system (i.e. bordering on barely better than nothing!), but that is a defeatist attitude. Some changes in attitude towards how the country works (and learn to ignore the shouts of communist or socialist), and it doesn't have to be that way.

You do know that cost wise, the US has the 1st and 2nd largest militaries in the world? There's you normal army/navy/airforce, but second is the CIA and all the secret shit.

Re:A simple cure - if you can't beat 'em...

[Actually, I do RTFA]

If you don't like the size of taxation in the US, maybe you should do something about that military?

The military budget pays for a lot of things with civilian use, ARPAdnet and GPS for one. Also, it pays for food programs for children (cannot have malnurished soldiers).

The other fact is that US does tend to lead most peacekeeping missions. It's a burden on us, and we are happy to shoulder it, because we can. So next time you see a sick American, thank him for his sacrifices for world peace.

This is independent from whether we fucked up by going into Iraq. I think everyone understands that, regardless of how it started, the US needs to leave order behind.

Re:A simple cure - if you can't beat 'em...

[cayenne8]

I think our entitlements already take up more of our budget than military spending, if not...it is darned close. They govt. has shown over and over that they cannot manage healthcare...medicare and medicaid is a travesty...and going broke. Let them fix that first.

I'm quite happy with my healthcare situation right now, and the govt is set to fuck that up for me if this current bill passes.

One reason our military is so large...is that so many other countries (expecially in EU) don't really fund their military as much anymore, so it is up to US to take up the slack there for them...

Our education system does suck, but it isn't from lack of funding...we spend a ton of $$ per student, but it doesn't reach them due to red tape and administration...not to mention that the teaching unions and other groups really get in the way of getting quality educators in there, etc....but, it isn't for lack of funding.

Re:A simple cure - if you can't beat 'em...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, just say "No"?

I know that the notion that a person may not want to sell something in this materialistic world is pretty crazy, but just because somebody wants to buy something you own, doesn't mean you have to sell it.

If you're willing to sell yourself into servitude though, hey, that's your choice.

Yet again

[tsotha]

Given that the significant bulk of social networkers are American, this might mean 'American behavior' could cause changes in the interpretation of English law (which is not to say English people don't also post their intimate details on Facebook)."

And here we have yet another European academic blaming me for problems in his own country. I guess you don't have to fix things that are someone else's fault.

Re:Yet again

[Anonymous Coward]

And here we have yet another butthurt American who spends his whole life looking for perceived slights against his beloved motherland and being angry about them.

The good thing is that you'll likely have a stroke before you're 60 and die like the bitter old fart you are.

Re:Good Morning.

[thetoadwarrior]

To be fair people shared all sorts of aspects of their life. The only difference now is places like Facebook (not myspace) add some visually appealing consistency rather than people going nuts on some Tripod/GeoCities WYSIWYG editor to create something awful.

Those products are only a by-product of the attention seekers. If we could put an end to this idea that you can be famous just for being famous (big thanks to reality TV for that) then perhaps we'd have less people doing anything for attention.

Don't get me wrong. I do think anyone should be able to voice their opinion and post what they want rather than everything being filtered through corporations but I think people would be more reasonable if there wasn't a slight chance (and really it is only a slight chance) of fame for doing something retarded.

Re:Good Morning.

[thetoadwarrior]

Yeah because I'm sure all those people with 200+ friends are really friends with 200+ people.

I'm sure I could sign up to MySpace and add 500 people as friends and get at least 100 of them to accept. That doesn't mean I actually have 100 friends.

Re:Good Morning.

[thetoadwarrior]

We need to add the mod option "creepy".

Re:Good Morning.

[digitig]

All predicted (or observe?) in Ben Elton's "Blind Faith", of course. "Only perverts do things in private."

only 3 words

[Anonymous Coward]

panem et circenses

(bread and circuses)

English law

[Kupfernigk]

Actually that is the case, and they wouldn't. Policing in the UK varies with social context. In Northern Ireland and other Irish-heavy areas of the UK there is a huge culture of car crime and the police pay little attention to it. Communities won't identify or testify against the perpetrators. Elsewhere young male car crime often appears as a lesser offence - TWOCing (taking without consent.) Whereas in some places car theft will result in rapid detection and punishment.

This is because in the UK we do not have a written Constitution but we do have common law - so in the absence of intervention by the tabloids and the attention-seekers in Government, law evolves according to community expectations. If it was not for the tabloids and politicians, cannabis would have been de facto legalised in the South-West thirty years ago by lack of interest from police and magistrates.

about you, but not --by-- you

[Onymous Coward]

... I, for one, do not post the intimate details of my life on the Internet.

I think the point is not what you reveal, but what is revealed about you.

If the norm is everyone posts private details about their lives which includes their private interactions with you... Then your reasonable expectation of privacy doesn't include your puking Friday night. Maybe not even what happened with that person on your friend's couch at 3 AM. What becomes public about your life is not only what you report, but what others report about you.

If at some time law (specifically interpretation, but maybe also legislation) starts obviously including the ramifications of our increasingly visible intimate lives, there might be some backlash. I'm having a hard time seeing the particular form such a law or interpretation would take. Maybe something like a precedent that it's okay for employers to use services that link together all references to you from friends' social site posts... ::shrug::

The point is that what is considered "private" is changing because all your friends are posting your and their lives publicly. It's not about what you post. If you want a non-public life, you'll have to spend time only with people who won't post your life.

I might recommend more "me" time. Perhaps alone in the basement. If you want social interaction, online chatting is good. But use a pseudonym. And maybe Tor. And you should probably make up a different identity or two that's hard to link with the real you. Like you're a 15-year-old female elf or something.

Re:about you, but not --by-- you

[Onymous Coward]

Okay, after R'ing the FA, scenarios are more imaginable.

So, in effect, any time you're in the company of other persons you should adopt a feeling like what you're doing is being video relayed on the net. Charming, no?

Eventually you should get that same feeling when you step out your front door. But don't let that (perhaps dystopian?) distant future distract you from the above-mentioned situation which mobile phone-wielding monkeys are bringing you now. The outside-is-globally-visible horror is a long, long ways away. Nothing to worry about just yet. Give it another, say, 7 years. Unless you live in Britain.

Re:about you, but not --by-- you

[whiplashx]

My first thought on this whole line of question is that protecting our privacy is the short term goal, but shouldn't the long term goal be to, well, be able to be free?

Personally, expressing myself to the world is quite important, and I willfully show everything to everyone on facebook, because I feel the most confident about myself that way. I smoke pot once or twice a year and I'm a computer programmer at Bioware, and if they want to fire me because I shared some personal information online, then that's their loss. (N.B. - I don't share this information with my parents, because I still prefer some privacy.)

So I interpret this whole thing positively. If everyone just damn well admits that they smoke pot, they can't ostracize the one who does it openly. There will always be some sense of privacy required (anything you aren't comfortable sharing) but my opinion is that the first concern is protecting your right to share information without the fear of reprisal.

-Thomas

Re:about you, but not --by-- you

[Anonymous Coward]

Like you're a 15-year-old female elf or something.

Uh huh. Why do I get vague feelings that it is a bad idea...? [even if you are female]

(I know it says "elf" after but any idiot who you tell that to is going to ignore the last part and think you are 15-yr-old with big ears or something. Also, elves are long-lived not short-lived, you could go with 265 years old that still looks like you are 20)

Re:about you, but not --by-- you

[Onymous Coward]

What about the people who do actually unpopular things? Is ostracism okay then?

I'm with you as far as wanting everyone to get along, but I consider that a harder problem than the privacy matter. Nonetheless, I care about it and intend to help.

Re:about you, but not --by-- you

[whiplashx]

I should have been clearer.

I meant that if activity is popular, then it helps show that the law is unfair. I did not mean that all laws are fair if they govern unpopular activities.

It probably is a harder problem but I'm suggesting solving the privacy problem first might be a "greedy" solution - not the optimal solution.

Please go home

[Kupfernigk]

You are just repeating tabloid guff, so either you don't really live here or you just commute from your company flat to the office and watch television in the evenings.

I too can manage lazy stereotypes about many cultures - but I've worked in enough countries to know they are nonsense. And I know that the only people who complain about political correctness in the UK are private school educated drones working for right wing newspapers.

Most Facebook Users are Not in the US

[monk]

At least according to Ben Lorica at O'Reilly Research. At the time of that post at least, the US made up about 35% of Facebook users, and the US and UK and Candada together made up about 61%. The US still had the most for a single country, but that's a long way from being the majority.

Fuck the Internet? Posting pics is nothing new

[mdwh2]

Facebook is actually one of the better places, in that it allows people to set privacy controls.

However people were posting pictures on the web - that could be viewed by absolutely anyone - long before Facebook came around.

And a special "fuck you" to attention-starved fucks who use any of the above.

Aww, diddums, says the guy who has to post on Slashdot.

Aggregation leads to dysfunctional freakshow

[HalAtWork]

Consequences aren't even the problem, it's the consequences of the assumptions people make that are the problem. People like to aggregate and derive "what happened" from that, and suddenly you're defending against a ton of actually baseless accusations that those people don't feel are baseless because they feel they have something substantial to back it up. Then it reaches the point where it doesn't even matter what really happened, it's what the majority believes happened.

Celebrities don't like their lives being invaded and on display on TV. Some may make stupid mistakes, some may just look stupid, but people love a scandal and TV stations love drawing people in with something inexpensive, and it's easy to draw a few lines and come up with a nasty picture. Suddenly everyone could be vulnerable to that type of finger pointing, public shaming, and other rubbish. How much do we need to be traumatized, do we really want to end up as a society that is nothing but a dysfunctional freakshow?

Re:Aggregation leads to dysfunctional freakshow

[ScrewMaster]

it's the consequences of the assumptions people make that are the problem.

That's a meaningless distinction if you don't get the job, or don't get into the school you applied to, or any of the other things that can happen. This is about people prejudging other people based upon a limited snapshot of that other person's life, I agree. But that's precisely the kind of "consequence" that I was talking about. If everyone in a position of authority who is reviewing Facebook pages were reasonable and tolerant, this probably wouldn't matter. But they're not. Frequently they're assholes, or politically-motivated, or just afraid for their own jobs if they make a mistake. So they'll make a snap judgment based upon a photo or a line or two of text on a Web site, and move on to the next candidate. That's the way it works, and if you don't understand that much about human nature, your Facebook page is probably the least of your worries.

what is the term for this kind of mental diarrhea?

[circletimessquare]

1. country X does something bad
2. the USA is to blame for what country X does because (insert speculative line of reasoning)

the story summary is a classic example of this kind of bullshit

you don't have to like the usa. there is in fact, a smorgasbord of reasons to dislike the USA and its policies for you to choose from

however, if you have to blame initiatives done by other country's governments on the USA, you've left the land of logical coherence and entered the land of tribal chip on your shoulder

have a valid reason to dislike the USA, or be a crackpot. your choice

Depends what law - and America is different anyway

[mdwh2]

I think it depends what laws we're talking about. For civil invasion of privacy cases (TFA mentions the Mosley case, for example), I can see it making sense. Consider, someone takes a photo of you at a private party, and posts it online. You sue them for invasion of privacy because they refuse to take it down. I can see that this is far less likely to succeed, because there's a reasonable expectation these days that photos end up on the Internet (certainly, if you know someone's taking a photo, you should assume this, and ask them not to if you're not okay with that). I still don't think this is much of a concern - the Mosley case involved people intentionally secretly filming an S&M scene, and then a newspaper publishing them those for profit. Just because people post party pics on Facebook, doesn't mean people post those kind of party pics on Facebook.

OTOH, I agree that it's ridiculous to apply this concept to the passing of new laws, or other cases. The BBC article is next to useless here - it's unclear what the academic actually said, and what is just opinion/speculation by the journalist.

I think it's also important to note that, AIUI, America has less in the way of privacy law. The Europe, it's part of the European Convention on Human Rights. In America, the balance between freedom of speech versus right to privacy is more likely to be weighed towards the former.

Indeed, I can't hope noting that whenever there are cases of the kind I describe - privacy versus free speech - the overwhelming consensus on Slashdot it in favour of allowing the images online, and against anyone who tries to sue them over privacy.

Privacy might be more of a luxury than a right

[serutan]

I think many things we presume to be rights are simply things we've gotten used to because authority structures have never had a reason to take them away. For example, years ago we had the "right" to take sharp objects aboard airplanes. Did we ever really have that right, or did we just get away with it because until recently it wasn't a problem? The idea of public safety constraining individual behavior is almost as old as civilization, and seems to me like a much more basic principle than any individual right or freedom.

Re:Privacy might be more of a luxury than a right

[Cwix]

Except I can claim that almost every single thing you do is counter to public safety. What if you keep the water running when you brush your teeth, your wasting potable drinking water, causing more money to be spent to produce the potable water, thus you are wasting tax payer public safety by forcing that money to be used on water instead of police. I can do this with pretty much any every day task. It is a bad argument, cause its unrealistic. How about we stop trying to save the kids, with unrealistic laws. I agree that public safety is important, but who gets to decide what needs to be curbed for the benefit of everyone else. The majority? I can show many examples where the majority did the "wrong" thing.

Re:what is the term for this kind of mental diarrh

[PeteV]

Franky I suggest you learn to read ...... "changing habits of the world-wide community of social networkers is likely to have an effect upon English law and how it is interpreted" and "this might mean 'American behavior' could cause changes in the interpretation of English law" ..... doesnt imply any like or dislike of the USA nor does it imply the USA is to blame for anything ... it doesnt even state that there is any blame ,..

Re:Good Morning.

[BlackSabbath]

And it's less than 140 characters.

Just saying...

Re:Good Morning.

[ascari]

have a nice day

Let's establish some ground rules: I'll have any kind of day I want, ok?

Re:Good Morning.

[ascari]

No, I'm not kidding.

I'm really sorry to hear that

Prude 2.0

[SuperKendall]

Dumb, fashion-following, uncritical people fuck it all up for everybody else: Welcome to Democracy in a nation where education is all geared up to turn kids into make tomorrows working drones instead of empowering them as self-thinking and self-opinied individuals.

You end up sounding just like the people that were aghast at Rock & Roll, and Free Love in the 60's. The stuff the kids are "fucking up" is, much like the heavily religious dogma of old, something you care about very much but is being discarded by new generations and it's upsetting you greatly. Well guess what, the kids are are on your lawn and they are not moving.

Welcome to a generational shift. No-one asked you if you liked it.

Frankly I think it's pretty funny you are talking about converting people into drones when the subject at hand is people posting personal details of themselves. It's pretty much the opposite of conforming and encouraging people to post the opinions they have for the world to see. The destruction of the concept of privacy as we know it comes not from above, but from a million million voices below speaking out as individuals.

Re:Prude 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Dumb, fashion-following, uncritical people fuck it all up for everybody else: Welcome to Democracy in a nation where education is all geared up to turn kids into make tomorrows working drones instead of empowering them as self-thinking and self-opinied individuals.

You end up sounding just like the people that were aghast at Rock & Roll, and Free Love in the 60's. The stuff the kids are "fucking up" is, much like the heavily religious dogma of old, something you care about very much but is being discarded by new generations and it's upsetting you greatly. Well guess what, the kids are are on your lawn and they are not moving.

Welcome to a generational shift. No-one asked you if you liked it.

Frankly I think it's pretty funny you are talking about converting people into drones when the subject at hand is people posting personal details of themselves. It's pretty much the opposite of conforming and encouraging people to post the opinions they have for the world to see.

Way to totally miss the point.

The destruction of the concept of privacy as we know it comes not from above, but from a million million buzzing drones below.

FTFY

Logic fail Redux

[Anonymous Coward]

If this argument was "Well, all my neighbors are nudists, so it's okay if we ban clothes," people would immediately point out how broken that is. But when it's about informational privacy, suddenly that doesn't apply?

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot?! ...happy now?

The situation is this: because a large number of people are sharing -- EVERYTHING -- that goes through their brains on public sites, the right to NOT share is dwindling. Because Bob and Charlie are exhibitionist twits, Alice hasn't got a leg to stand on when she wants to clamp down on her personal information -- her position looks increasingly paranoid and reactionary. The government and corporations are QUITE happy to swallow as much of our information as they are offered, and even if nothing else changes, the fact that Alice doesn't share while Bob and Charlie do means that Alice falls under heightened scrutiny (what does she have to hide?).

Privacy, like most rights, exists because a majority of the population agrees that it should exist. When a large number of people suddenly don't get what all the fuss is about, the right becomes threatened, just like any other one could be. Free speech gets challenged when someone decides that the government should step up and stop people from saying nasty things about their social group, religion, or race; it also gets challenged when nobody stands up for the "fringe cases" -- the skinheads, the borderline snuff peddlers, the semi-culpable whistleblowers. Privacy is injured when nobody speaks up about corporations compiling and sharing databases incorporating enormous amounts of very personal information, or about governments mandating the creation of such databases.

Maybe we're ultimately headed for a society of glass houses. Maybe we'll be better off for it. However, I don't feel that our future has been established, nor that the superiority of total transparency has been demonstrated or even justified. I think that the case needs to be explored very carefully in advance, and that encroachments upon our presumed private zone need to be given strict scrutiny.

Privacy is not needed

[happy monday]

The desire for privacy arises out of a concern for what others think of you, a concern for your status, and the desire not to be humiliated. But too great a concern for what others think of us, our social status in relation to others, and a great fear of humiliation, from which the desire for privacy stems, all result from our having evolved in an environment where higher social status was selected for due to the statistical accident that it generated more offspring which inherited the trait of desiring high status. Beyond a certain level, therefore, all the benefits of status are benefits to our genetic material, not to us as individuals - Expending effort to preserve a trait the ultimate function of which is to preserve itself is ridiculous in the context of what we have come to understand as human wellbeing. It is wasted effort, since it is not used for our own fulfilment, but to ensure that the trait to preserve the trait is inherited by as many individuals as possible. To acquire status which is only beneficial to the trait for acquiring status is stupid, therefore the psychological (pre-programmed by evolution) emphasis we place on our own status is also stupid, and what's more, it causes inestimable damage to our welfare. The desire for privacy is a result of this obsession with status and our place in relation to others, and the accompanying fear of humiliation. We have to let go of these things. Really, it doesn't matter if your neighbours see that picture of you in women's underwear. Really, it doesn't. Let go of it. Humiliation is a purely imagined, purely psychological pain. Let go of it. It is your instincts making you feel like that, instincts which do not care about your happiness, which in fact rely on you never being happy to ensure they are passed on to your offspring - your constant striving for success, which causes you so much stress and effort, your constant dissatisfaction with your status, your misery, is solely a result of this instinct which has been blindly selected for because those with it, while less happy, outnumbered those who didn't have it. We can remove it from ourselves by ignoring it. It is not that important to have high status, endless wealth. You only need one house, one partner, enough food for your family, you don't need dozens of houses, dozens of cars. We are psychologically unbalanced, humanity, because of evolution, and the insecure desire for privacy, the fear of being exposed in society, is a result of this, and is illogical. Let go.

Re:Privacy is not needed

[MikeFM]

My opinion is that privacy hurts more than it helps. If everyone is transparent about what they are doing then we don't all have to feel weird for just being normal. It's these people that do bad things and hide behind privacy while publicly judging others that are the problem. Lack of privacy is maybe the biggest equalizer of all as it puts everyone on a equal playing field. Besides from a purely practical point of view we're getting close to a time when privacy will be nearly impossible to achieve in any meaningful way. You could try to fight technology with lots of laws but it'd be a losing battle. Just accept that people are going to see you naked, know everything you do, and know exactly where you are. Facebook is the least of your worries if you don't like this.

Re:Privacy is not needed

[acid_andy]

It's these people that do bad things and hide behind privacy while publicly judging others that are the problem

but who's to decide what is "bad"? It ends up being the government and the less privacy individuals have, the more power the government has over them. That's fine so long as the governments laws are ethical and fair (in the eyes of the people) but many would argue that is already not entirely the case. I don't buy this "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" crap the brainwashed masses seem to be spouting.

If you totally remove all privacy then you need to have a small government allowing lots of individual freedom and ideally a reduction in the number of laws. It seems to me the world is moving the opposite way towards governments with more and more power making bigger and bigger numbers of more and more restrictive laws. You end up with an Orwellian society where everyone is a criminal and anyone who is an inconvenience can be made to disappear...

</tinfoilhat>

Re:Privacy is not needed

[izomiac]

Privacy is more than the protection against humiliation, it is a tool to prevent others from acting on incomplete information. If everyone knew everything about everyone then we'd be a very tolerant people that probably preemptively executed or isolated the hopelessly sociopathic. The problem is that such a world is impossible since we cannot know what a person is thinking, nor monitor them all the time, nor remember that much information even if it were available. Therefore, we're forced to make decisions about people given our very limited information on them. Since it's nearly impossible to be completely independent of other humans, we must do what we can to guide their opinions and decisions in a way that benefits us. This is necessary for both gene propagation and rational happiness.

As for genetics, traits that enable us to have the greatest number of progeny are selected for. This means that our emotions are beneficial for this, and most likely happiness itself is a reward for getting closer to this goal. Either way, we are what we are. These traits don't work against us, they are us. Beyond that, there isn't really a "humiliation" gene. There are genes that construct neurons which form fairly random neural networks, and genes that provide feedback to shape these networks into something evolutionarily useful. Besides genes, human society also shapes these networks, and there's an evolutionary benefit to emulating successful behaviors. Without doing so a human cannot achieve a high level of functionality, since that would be akin to the first caveman building a car (then insuring it).

While it's true that you could probably mold your "happiness" to not be at all dependent on others, how is that beneficial? If something displeases you then you have two ways to solve that problem. The first is to change yourself so that it no longer displeases you, and the other is to change it. Privacy is a means of preemptively changing society, or at least how you fit into it. It's a perfectly valid solution, and one that doesn't compromise your own personal existance. OTOH, if it doesn't work for you then ignoring others is always an option. It is just more logical to try privacy first since it's much easier to try the former then switch to the latter if it doesn't work than vice versa.

Re:Privacy is not needed

[MikeFM]

Without privacy we all decide what is bad. You're wrong. It's with privacy that government is the only one peeking in our windows. It's a one way experience with no way to know who knows what. Transparency will let you know that everyone knows but you'll also know everything about them. If you want to. After the first excitement most people would get bored. Secrets aren't fun when everyone knows them.

Re:Privacy is not needed

[sowth]

I'm not so sure governments decide what is bad as much as "religious leaders." If you don't belong to the "one true religion" or conform to its beliefs then they and their "followers" will try to erase you one way or another.

Re:Good Morning.

[Anonymous Coward]

Privacy is overrated.

And for all the hype ....

[King_TJ]

The reality seems to be much different. I'm a regular Facebook user myself, and just about everyone I cared enough about to make a "friend" on there and follow posts nothing Id say would really cause a loss of privacy for them.

Most of the time, it's such "revealing" information as "I wish this cold weather would end soon!", or someone filling us in on where they decided to go out to eat earlier in the evening.

The "Facebook/MySpace" phenomenon you speak of is little more than people finding a new tool to "mass communicate" with their friends, and possibly re-locate old, lost ones. Like everything, its usefulness or destructiveness is all about HOW you implement it.

Honestly, I get the most out of Facebook when my friends dig up interesting and relevant news items and post URLs for the rest of us to see and discuss. It's far more efficient than getting one forwarded to you in a random email, when somebody has your address handy and realizes you'd be especially interested in it.

Re:And for all the hype ....

[ScrewMaster]

The reality seems to be much different

The reality that you are aware of is different, you mean. But I'm talking about that hidden reality, where you never know how someone interpreted what you posted (or what others posted about you) and the effect it may have upon your life. Heck, I'll never know what effect what's already out there has had on my life, my prospects ... and I'm a law-abiding citizen with no criminal record, nothing that I think would cause me grief. But I don't know, and I see no reason to make the problem worse.

But like I said earlier, this is a tradeoff ... some deliberate loss of privacy for the perceived benefits of such services. Each of us is free to make that tradeoff as we see fit: obviously I'm a bit more conservative than you are.

Re:And for all the hype ....

[ScrewMaster]

Also, at this point in my life, the consequences are probably minimal. I am who I am, I have thirty years of my career behind me, and if I posted drunken pictures of myself at a party I doubt anyone would care. The question is, would that be the same for a person in their early twenties, say, who's just starting out? It's a lot easier to get burned by indiscretion when you're young.

A twisted thought...

[HigH5]

Would it be possible to use DMCA to force people pull down pics with your face on them?

Re:A twisted thought...

[MikeFM]

If your face has an anti-piracy device built-in. I dunno if being ugly counts.

Re:A twisted thought...

[evanbd]

Would it be possible to use DMCA to force people pull down pics with your face on them?

Sure, assuming you own the copyright to the photos. Normally the photographer owns the copyright, so normally you can't (assuming that, since you were in the photo, you weren't the photographer).

Of course, the stuff around model releases and such gets more complicated, but that has little to do with copyright and therefore the DMCA.

Re:A twisted thought...

[sowth]

Who bothers having an actual copyright on an item to send a DMCA notice? Anyone who reads slashdot on any regular basis knows plenty of people send false DMCA complaints with no worry of punishment. ...well, except for the possibility of a little public shaming and more people hearing about the thing you are trying to suppress.

No punishment for taking away the free speech rights of others or taking away their ability to do legitimate business and such. You can easily take away someone's copyright by spamming the internet with DMCA complaints against their work, and then when caught say: "oops, sorry! My temp made a mistake."

Re:A twisted thought...

[evanbd]

According to the DMCA, someone's signature needs to be on the notice, and that person is asserting under penalty of perjury that the notice is valid. The recipient probably won't fight back, but if they do you might be in trouble.

Re:A twisted thought...

[sowth]

Yeah sure. How often has that happened?

Re:A twisted thought...

[evanbd]

More than once... and it's a lot more likely to happen to you if you don't have lots of money and lawyers.

Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazing how everyone sidesteps the real issue. You'll always find a way to screw things up for other people even if invading is currently out of fashion. And you wonder why you're so hated.

Re:Good Morning.

[The End Of Days]

People entertaining themselves with a large social circle of acquaintances aren't any less real than you are. You have no greater intrinsic value despite your derision.

death of privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

20th century was the death of privacy and anyone sticking up for it obviously has something to hide
or so says google..

Friends?

[watergeus]

From the Article:

"A decade ago, he said, there would have been an assumption that it might be circulated among friends.
But now the assumption is that it may well end up on the internet and be viewed by strangers."

I have a lot of friends that are strangers. The meaning of the word 'friend' is changing in the digital world.

Privacy is a myth

[nortonmansfield]

In small communities, there is no privacy. Privacy emerged with the advent of large cities, at the price of Marxian alienation. As we move toward the hive mind, mankind is rediscovering a need to connect that only seems frightening because it follows a quarter century of one way mass media. Our present society is technically advanced, but culturally naive.

Re:Privacy is a myth

[digsbo]

You got it right. When you had to be closely associated with your community just to get by everyone knew your business. You were accountable to your family because if you were unreliable in paying your bills, etc., your family would suffer. The general store owner couldn't check your credit rating, he had to know you personally or have someone vouch for you to extend you credit. In many cases you wouldn't ever have lived alone; no extended period in your 20s with no one to answer to where you could do things considered "inappropriate" by your family. Privacy was something that existed briefly when economic conditions permitted it in a few wealthy societies. Even today, my lower-class Mexican neighbors live 10 to a house that a typical middle-class white family would consider appropriate for 4 or 5. Do you think adolescents in 1100 sq. foot house have a reasonable expectation of privacy? Nope.

Re:Good Morning.

[Kjella]

And it's less than 140 characters. Just saying...

Dude, if you twitter about how twitter is bad you get a recursive epic FAIL.

Re:Good Morning.

[Anonymous Coward]

Would it be +1 Creepy or -1 Creepy?

YOU IDIOTS blame the wrong target!

[myspace-cn]

I'd like to point out the fact our privacy laws in each of our respective countries are based on "officials" and their decisions. Not the public. Not Myspace, Facebook, or Twitter either. So while several social networking websites are painted as target by several misguided asshole replies (and their parrots) in this thread, the misguided theory actually puts the blame on the wrong target. Your country's leaders suck, your country's "officials" suck, your country's law enforcement sucks, your judges are corrupt. You want your privacy back? You better throw out the shit stains running your country off the cliff with all this terrorist / war propaganda.

The following mentality is a total failure to comprehend the world around you:

Fuck Myspace. Fuck Facebook. Fuck Twitter.
And a special "fuck you" to attention-starved fucks who use any of the above.

The truth behind this attitude is you simply don't like these services. So Man up. The world isn't a joke anymore. There may be the rare exception, but not 50 /. posts. That's propaganda / brainwashing.
If you really want to target myspace, facebook, twitter you need to use the Corporate angle, or the TOS /AUP angle

What you really meant:

Fuck My Officials, Fuck Law Enforcement, Fuck Judges, Fuck shitty Laws, and Fuck our Leaders who break their oath.
And in the USA a special "fuck you" to the spooks with the FIOS splitter

After all if your officials didn't make the shitty laws, you wouldn't have a problem with social networking, or free music from bands on myspace.

So go ahead, don't think for yourself, and don't root out the corruption. Listen to misguided who don't fight the corrupt system, instead pointing out alternative, incorrect targets leading your ass right off the cliff. Privacy will be the least of your problems, when the bond market crashes.

You want to know who has privacy? The Banks! The Spooks! The Elected! Your Officials! State Secrets to cover up crimes! Corporations with big Patent's, Trademarks, Copyrights

Re:Good Morning.

[uuddlrlrab]

Seriously...that's like...dividing by the product of dividing by zero. That's like the universe saying Candlejack. I can't th

Why American?

[ignavus]

There are more Chinese people on the web than American, aren't there (or soon will be)?

Why base privacy expectations on the behaviour of Americans, rather than people in other countries?

I suspect the answer is: the Internet only matters to British law in so far as it is English-speaking. It is biased, then, to Americans - the largest group of English-speakers.

Geological Analogy At Its Limits

[PingPongBoy]

With analogy to long term erosion, everything disappears. Privacy would be completely gone. How would be achieved? Imagine machines that can read everything. Already, there are radar devices and whatnot to probe beneath the ground, inside of oceans, etc. Is it such a stretch for machines to observe your actions behind walls, to the level of detail, say, to know what your are typing on a keyboard. You would be at risk of losing not only privacy but also identity.

What would the world be like then? At the very least some people will hide behind thick walls or Faraday cages. Some will opt out of being registered anywhere, but may carry many aliases. Anonymity cannot be attacked or usurped. The identity basis of contract law would be tested to its limits. A world devoid of privacy may suffer from the dual of being devoid of foolproof biometrics.

One option would be to plot out in minutiae the details of the days ahead so that an alibi can be established at all times. This might be a workable ounce of prevention. Another option is to hoard and hide physical assets and stake out as much dominion as possible. Technology just doesn't make it easier for people.

Red Herrings Anyone?

[b4upoo]

Privacy is a non starter in the race. People have the right to know, to study, to collect information. That right to know far surpasses anyone's supposed right to privacy. It becomes an absurd dance. How could you know if I were collecting too much information about you? I know! You must be allowed to search my records to make sure. Where did my right to privacy go? And if I store up that data in my photographic memory should you be allowed to cut my head off to make certain that I don't have too much information about you stored in my mind?

visibility of our natures helps (some)

[Onymous Coward]

Taboo must be a topic of great interest to you. It seems there can be social inertia despite common individual preference or even broad popularity.

Hm. Your idea of promoting frankness does seem to be a good one. It's not something that "established" personalities can do easily because they're believed to be relatively static and thus less forgivable for mistake or aberrance. "Youthful indiscretion" is a shield that youth can use to embolden their openness. So maybe it's a good thing that social sites are used primarily by youth. (Teach them well and let them lead the way...)

Ah, but it seems also that visibility is a double-edged sword. Sure, if most folks were open about their lives we might find greater tolerance for or even acceptance of evident commonalities. Even to the degree of changing "unfair" laws. That's great. However, unpopularity still remains, and oddity (does not equal) immorality, harmfulness, or bad. In a new era of openness there could be a far greater tendency towards intolerance of deviation, especially since the major in-group would be that much more pervasive. You'd have to assure somehow that oddity tolerance did not evaporate. I think the only truly effective way to do that would be to establish a fundamental value system which folks of all stripes could buy into. With that clarified folks would be able to deduce morality rather than relying on sheer popularity (of intuitively presumed pre-deduced morality).

Oh, hm. It seems that moral decisions resulting from a value system are needed rather than just relying on popularity to vouch for the acceptability of behavior. For example, let's say when all was revealed that a vengeful mindset were overwhelmingly the tendency. That could empower (legally, socially) vengeance. So that there is a edge to the sword, perhaps more appropriately the first edge, in opposition to oddity devaluation, than was the concept of empowering common good nature. Unpopularity does not mean bad, popularity does not mean good. The benefit of empowering common good nature might be the sword's pommel or something. Anyway.

Again, establishing a popular and fundamental value system would be necessary to avoid the fallout from these two main effects of widespread frankness. So maybe come up with some good ideas and travel around teaching folk. As a marketing strategy perhaps get yourself nailed to a tree and we'll all cross our fingers that your ideas take.

• Robbers Cave experiment
• Social Identity Theory
• The Authoritarians

(It's interesting that you call the privacy patch-up a "greedy" solution. Do you mean that in the sense that it's driven by short-sighted personal needs rather than an eye towards greater social benefit? There's one other sense I can imagine for use of "greedy", but it's a quirky perspective that I don't think others would be familiar with. It's fun, though: Impulsiveness can be seen as subverting the welfare of your future self for your current self's satisfaction, and you can cast that future self as something like a different person. Future me == "other", current me = "self". Thus impulsiveness, as opposed to delay of gratification, can be seen as a sort of selfishness.)

Re:visibility of our natures helps (some)

[whiplashx]

If you're still following this, I meant a "greedy" solution as in algorithms, in other words a solution that is aimed at the local maximum instead of the global maximum. Not necessarily a moral judgment.

However I don't mind your characterization of the issue.

I find those links incredibly interesting, so thank you!

Re:visibility of our natures helps (some)

[Onymous Coward]

I received notice via the Slashdot system that you'd replied to me.

I understand now what you mean by greedy. It actually jibes well with all kinds of conception of greed.

You're very welcome.

Re:Good Morning.

[Psaakyrn]

Actually, closer to diving 0 by 0... which I've no idea what it means either.

Re:Good Morning.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck Myspace.
Fuck Facebook.
Fuck Twitter.

And a special "fuck you" to attention-starved fucks who use any of the above.

Ooh, don't forget slashdot, where you devulge your political views, stupid anectdotes and poor sense of humor to all your friends, coworkers and future business associates. So please don't stop; continue to the conclusion:

Fuck Slashdot and a special fuck you to the attention starved fucks who use it.

Re:Good Morning.

[psithurism]

Quite right, I'm sure I could also try to make 500friends in RL and at least 100 of them would accept. That doesn't mean I actually have 100 friends. ...wait I've confused myself.