Slashdot Mirror
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)."
. 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.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
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.
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.
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.
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Would it be possible to use DMCA to force people pull down pics with your face on them?
Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.
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.
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
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.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........