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)."
Don't worry, there will always be privacy. It will just be solely reserved for corporations.
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
. 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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".
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.
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.
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?
Sig: I stole this sig.
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...
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.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
No, but judging by my email I have hundreds of friends on LinkedIn. Even though I have no account there.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
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.
Translation of Translation:
"I have no real friends so I am relying on Facebook to cover the deficit."
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.
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)
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).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
We need to add the mod option "creepy".
All predicted (or observe?) in Ben Elton's "Blind Faith", of course. "Only perverts do things in private."
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
... 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.
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."
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.
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?
Twinstiq, game news
And it's less than 140 characters.
Just saying...
have a nice day
Let's establish some ground rules: I'll have any kind of day I want, ok?
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.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
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.
Would it be possible to use DMCA to force people pull down pics with your face on them?
Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.
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.
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.
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.