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Should Cyborgs Have the Same Privacy Rights As Humans?
Jason Koebler (3528235) writes When someone with an e-tattoo or an implanted biochip inevitably commits a crime, and evidence of that crime exists on that device within them, do they have a legal right to protect that evidence? Do cyborgs have the same rights as humans? "The more you take a thing with no rights and integrate it indelibly into a thing that we invest with rights, the more you inevitably confront the question: Do you give the thing with no rights rights, or do you take those rights away from the thing with rights?," Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who just released a paper exploring the subject, said.
No. They should set their bar a bit higher than that.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Of course, an Anonymous Coward complaining about too many privacy rights. Nothing ironic about that.
Citizens united protects cyborgs. If a cyborg acts as a representative for a person, it gets all the rights of a person.
So you never do anything in secret? I certainly don't want you or anyone else to know what I am doing. Fuck the the assholes in this world who try to tell me how to live my life. I wasn't born to be a slave or to follow your rules. My life is my own bitch.
those are called lawyers in the USofA
Cyborgs are just kinds of humans, so yes. Unless you count cyborg cats, which would be a more interesting question which would have to depend on the cognitive abilities of said cyborg cat.
Cyborgs are still humans (they just happen to have electronic implants), so yes they should have the same rights.
Your name is just as anonymous moron regardless if you posted it publicly. We still don't know who you are but if we wanted the first anon can be tracked as easy as you.
What if we had external memory implanted into our brain/spine, which we could record events (from the optic nerve) and whatnot?
I'd like to see anything that is permanently attached to our body be secure against search and seizure.
An implanted cell phone is no different, legally, than any other cell phone. The cops can't search your cell phone without permission or a warrant, why could an implanted one be any different? At worst, it'd be the same process to forcibly take a DNA sample, which also requires probably cause.
Does the Brookings Institute require their senior fellows to publish on a regular basis to keep getting a paycheck or something? Cuz I'm having a hard time figuring out any other reason for this.
I would think this would be just an extension of the idea of self incrimination. Yes it's a 'cyborg' and not a robot. So conceivably the 'human' part of the combination was in charge of the volition that led to whatever thing is being investigated.
However: If I commit a crime with a tape recorder in my pocket, should the state be able to subpoena me for the tape? They would. Similarly, cyborgs could expect the same treatment. (forcible extraction of whatever data was requested.)
What if technology reaches the point that they'd be able to scan our brain?
s/cyborg/douche
Your DNA is part of you, as are your fingerprints, and may carry evidence against you. The fifth amendment protection against self-incrimination does not extend to refusing to give your DNA or fingerprints. You do have the right to refuse to give them voluntarily, but if there is probable cause the police can obtain a warrant and force you to provide samples. This actually exactly the same standard as with other items you might possess... your home, your papers, your cellphone, etc.
I think other forms of evidence embedded in your body will be treated similarly. You can't be compelled to give verbal testimony, but if you choose to have a recorder embedded in your body that gathers evidence that can be used against you, it will be legally permissible to compel you to hand over that evidence, unless doing so would physically harm you.
Now that I've expressed my opinion, I'll go RTFA to see if the author has a different one, and if he's convincing.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Are you 'tarded or something. Tracking ACoward can be much harder than an actual username. Logged in users with a long posting history leak all kinds of information about who they are, information that can possibly trace back to them without an IP address. At worst both just leave an IP, which if measures are taken, such as proxies or hacked machines can be near impossible to track.
Anywhoo, the upshot of that is that if the cyborg is a person, the cyborg should have the same rights as a person, and should damn well be able to marry another cyborg if they want to. I'm not going to allow some uneducated shithead to stand between me and my Sony HD Eyeballs (Now with TerminatorVision(tm)).
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Hmm, well, I actually came here to make some sort of comment like that... are there no advocates for full transparency?
Increasingly we're living in a world where everything is recorded. Back in the old days you just had to tell everyone that "God is watching" to make them behave. It kinda worked (the Renaissance was pretty much started because bankers were trying to buy their way out of Hell by commissioning works of art for the church). These days with so much privacy, there's not really any incentive to do anything quite like that, and we sort of have an unbalanced arms raced between those who have the money to monitor everyone else and yet guard their own privacy and anonymity.
What if, say in a parallel universe or another planet, there was a society that just simply had full transparency? No pictures of our private parts to worry about, because, well, everyone has them. Everyone shares their browsing history, because, gee, you're into interesting stuff. No need to guard your birthday and SSN because, well, there's actually real cryptographic security keeping people from opening accounts in your name. And if they they did take anything (including the people in power), we'd know who it was and where it went and how to get it back.
I mean, I know this is Slashdot and all, but humor me here.
You need a warrant to search external electronics that belong to people. You should also need a warrant to search internal electronics that belong to people. There is no new legal questions created by putting electronics inside people rather than simply keeping them detached.
You can't just shove your iphone up your ass claim to be a cyborg to evade a search warrant. By the same token, the police can't use the fact that your iphone is up your ass to call you a cyborg and search it without getting a warrant.
The power-holders make sure both precedents exist and get applied as they wish.
I don't see why cyborgs shouldn't have rights too. Corporations are heartless, non-emotional machines of industry and they already have more rights than humans.
A corollary to this is whether communication through any mechanically-assisted means should be defined as speech. I think this has a huge implication on copyrights. As we become more integrated with these devices, the line between what we say, think, and digitally transfer becomes gray. What if instead of describing a movie or song to someone, we're able to transfer our perfect memory of it directly to their memory?
To hide tamper or destroy evidence, why should someone with a gps chip stuck in their ass have it
sounds like some "I made myself a freak and now I should be treated special" bullshit
To decide this, we need to look at the history of the 5th Amendment and how the courts have interpreted it. I'm not a lawyer, but I think it's pretty clear that cyborgs' personal data will be covered.
According to Wikipedia's article on the 5th Amendment, courts have been pretty expansive. You can't even be required to turn over the password to an encrypted hard drive if it would incriminate you.
If I understand the history, the 5th Amendment was partly a backlash over the horribly unfair "Star Chamber" legal proceedings, and also against the use of torture to extract a confession. As a minarchist libertarian, I think it is wise to hold government on a short leash, and I am in favor of keeping the government from taking shortcuts that lead to convictions. But on the other hand, I'm in favor of the truth winning in trials. If you are driving a car and there is a collision, I want experts to be able to examine the "black box" from your car (assuming your car has one); I don't think you can reasonably claim that turning over your "black box" would constitute self-incrimination. So if we imagine a sort of "black box" inside the body of a cyborg, it's hard for me to think that should be private while I think the black box from a car shouldn't be.
Of course, I don't want to see someone have their cyborg body's black box hacked to plant fake evidence against them, but that seems awfully hypothetical at this point.
Hmmm. I wonder if anyone is going to be required to produce the data from their FitBit or other exercise tracker during a criminal investigation anytime soon. I'm guessing that the courts might hold that the 5th Amendment would protect that data. But it would be pretty amazing if you had a guy accused of stabbing someone, and his wrist device had a log showing his hand making stabbing motions at the time the murder occurred!
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I would think that the cybernetic bits should be treated no differently than any other physical evidence on or in a person's body. If, for example, paint stains on a suspect's shoes prove that (s)he was at a certain location at a certain time, that's effectively the same thing as an implanted chip that proves the same thing.
We aren't in control of our data or devices anyway. If anything has been shown in the past, is that everything we do with our shiny new devices is phoned home to HQ for further analysis. No way of being self-sustained. It could leak trade secrets. And the users don't care, so lure them with a bit convenience, and they are all yours. No need to get data from inside a suspect, its already enough to just ask google what he has asked google. Google may not be in direct contact with our nerves, but if we include it into our very own thought processes, it becomes part of our brain.
Seriously; in light of all the violations of our "privacy" by the government, what "rights" can we humans be said to retain?
Viewed in that light, however, the answer is probably a depressing "Yes".
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
a cyborg is a human with devices, instead of carried are implanted. A human with a cellphone has rights, why would implanting a radio communications system suddenly change?
A human with an artificial heart or artificial limbs is still human. Same rights to privacy exist.
Anything else is too much navel gazing. Some things ARE simple.
All of Slashdot can use the AC account, while only a subset of Slashdot (often only one person) can use any given named account. People leak information when they type, and if the same person or small group of people can be identified by an anonymized identifier like a username, then you can glean information about whoever's using that name.
/. posts.
It's like the databases of "anonymized" information. Gather enough information, and eventually you'll have enough data points to uniquely identify an individual. That's pretty far off from "just as anonymous", provided someone wants to actually do the work to datamine someone else's old
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
He's trying to distract from the topic. This Cyborg business is about giving EXTRA rights and SPECIAL rights, to the Robosexual minority.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Except, you have just shown that you do in fact follow *some* rules.
For example, you follow grammatical rules, sentence structure and syntax. You obviously are educated, and as such have followed "those" rules. You are posting on an internet site, and as such one can infer that you have access to a computer, electricity, and internet service, so you are a member of a first world society...
So, which rules exactly do you feel are "unjust", and thereby not appropriate for you to follow?
Of note, that consideration is typically considered a common ideology, and as such carries with it it's own set of societal "rules" that are typically obeyed by those who are within that group, even if those rules are themselves tacitly conveyed.
Thirty four characters live here.
It's all part of the secular cyborgist robosexual agenda.
Assuming that it was impossible to have *any* privacy, you would immediately see widespread persecution of anyone who didn't fit the "norm". Shortly afterward, anyone with any intelligence would cease any public activities which did not meet general approval and start looking for ways to engage in them so that only other people with those hobbies would know about it - in effect, clamoring to restore the lost privacy.
In short, a life without privacy is one where you must live according to how everyone else wants you to live, whether than living how *you* want to live. It is a prison without bars.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
IT'S PROVEN FACT!
Give a cyborg privacy? He'll win the Olympics, for sure. And then he'll KILL his girlfriend.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
1% and the GOP will use this to jail anyone who trys to gum-up the works as there jobs are taken away. But look at the up side the jail / prison must give you health care
Humans have too many privacy rights as it is. Groups like ISIS happen because we're more concerned about doing all of our daily tasks in secret rather than being safe.
I think the previous poster already answered your question about what rules he thinks are unjust.
If you commit a crime, and videotape yourself doing it, the police can execute a search warrant to recover the recording and use it against you in court. Just because you choose to hide the recorder inside your own body -- whether it's surgically implanted or just up your arse -- doesn't change the legal argument. New legal ground will only be exposed when we have brain implants which directly interface with your mind; if the device records your thoughts as you think them THEN the 5th Amendment would potentially come into play.
Very idealistic. We could do with more transparency. Mroe than that, we could do with more equality of transparency. The rich get to hide their mistakes behind the corporate veil. Those of us who aren't executives of corporations have more limited options.
However, until the law is perfect, justice is truly fair, and our peers are totally enlightened about freedom of thought, speech, and so forth, all of which may be never, privacy is important. Is there anyone who hasn't had things to hide from our own parents? Especially our parents? Like that you got a warning for speeding while you were out on the town last night? Think of all the potentially embarrassing things there are to buy, such as porn magazines, sex toys, alcoholic drinks, hemorrhoid medicine, denture adhesive, and certain genres of music. I would love to have the hypocrisies and tyrannies uncovered and shamed out of existence by acknowledgement that lots of people have the same problems and desires. I mean things like that your parents engaged in sex to bring you into the world, but they forbid that you learn any details about sex (The stork brought you? You appeared under a cabbage leaf?), and certainly forbid that you try it! Just having a waist size connected to your name could be more than embarrassing, supposing it suggests that you are overweight, and you suffer discrimination from people who have never even seen you?
There are also political issues. Do you want it known whether you voted Republican or Democrat, or some 3rd party? Some examples of political issues are the War on Piracy and the War on Drugs. Years ago, there was the hysteria over Communism, with the House Un-American Activities Committee and the infamous Joe McCarthy ruining the careers of many in Hollywood. That has all been discredited now and we are at last easing up on drugs. Piracy however is still raging. And it can still happen again, with climate scientists such as Michael Mann among some of the more recent victims. They did their utmost to fish through his private emails for evidence that he was incompetent or a liar, and when they couldn't find good enough dirt, they exaggerated what they could. There are powerful interests that would very much like to use more transparency to force their extreme views on copyright on the rest of us. Would you like to be sued for copying a recording to another device? Arrested and your equipment seized, for timeshifting? With total transparency, they could do that. But fortunately for us all, the universe does not work that way. They cannot win, but they can hurt plenty of people before they are at last shut down. I think someday, copying will be legal, and seen as good for everyone, even artists. Until then, we all just have to be a little cautious, and keep it quiet whenever we do anything they could construe as piracy.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Dr Barnard, I presume.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I think this is a joke because we really don't have privacy rights. The NSA doesn't think so, most government don't think so.
So what privacy rights are we talking about again?
Be seeing you...
Total transparency is not healthy for human psychology and social behavior. Just look at what the spying programs have done to create the current delusional group psychosis that is washington DC culture. Do you really want to be at the mercy of a bureaucratically enforced morality for every little decision you make? If everyone knew everyone else's business, you can be sure that getting permission to do anything noteworthy would be next to impossible. You can kiss individuality goodbye.
I would never, ever want to live in such a society.
Cyborgs will henceforth legally count as 3/5 a person.
(too soon?)
If you folk's look at it from my perspective: Where i live the police photograph the Tat's of the gang guy's and gal's why not document a Cyborg?
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
Indeed to me it's pretty simple. The group will really has no business influencing an individuals personal and private life. The life that has nothing to do with anyone else. Especially.
Other than that, really for many of us, me, particularly, an idealistic society is one in which every person is individually empowered and completely independent from the moires of society.
don't over think it!
I dont see how an implant would be treated any different than a cell phone, or a diary.
Privacy, unless they get a warrant.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If I commit a crime and my shoes or other clothing contain evidence of my criminal act, is the clothing legally treated as if it's "part of me" or as if it's not?
Generally not. Think about all the crime dramas where dirt that is only found at the crime scene is found in the suspect's shoes, or where the dye from the exploding dye-pack was found on the suspect's clothing.
Much more likely to be a legal issue is the issue of how invasive the legal system can be to retrieve the evidence. A few years ago there was an alleged perpetrator who was shot during a crime. I don't remember how it all turned out but there were major court fights over whether the police could force the person to undergo non-life-threatening surgery to remove the bullet fragments on the grounds that they were evidence in a crime.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
A cyborg is still a human, no matter how augmented they are, they have the right to have their junk kept private. Why are we even having this debate?
A robot, on the other hand, shouldn't be allowed any sort of privacy. They are not alive, no matter how much you love them, they aren't, they are just a glorified computer that can walk around, nothing more than objects. (for the distant future where robots are a thing)
Human: "That's a pretty small frame-bolt you got there in the front."
Bot: "Mind your own biz, smelly human, or my lawyer will delete you!"
Table-ized A.I.
See Post Title
First, I agree completely with your comment. Secondly, I don't even have to RTFA to see that TFA rides the short bus.
As a cyborg, I find this entire topic offensive. A cyborg is part animal and part machine, and guess what? There are a hell of a lot of us. I have a CrystaLens implant in my left eye, making glasses unnecessary for me (I see better than you do). It is a device that uses the eye's muscles to focus. I'm 62 and need no corrective lenses whatever.
Do you know someone with a cochlear implant? Artificial hip or knee? Heart pacemaker? They, like me, are all cyborgs by dictionary definition.
The former vice president of the US was a cyborg, now he's a chimera.
The question "should cyborgs have rights" is stupid and insulting. Shame on the article's author.
Free Martian Whores!
this question reeks of absent-minded techie "disruptive innovation"
so zero privacy rights...everyone can look at everything? have you thought this through?
so the password to the safe where I keep my guns...that's open for everyone?
does this "full transparency" apply to only digital information? if so, people would just do things they want by paper like before there was ever digital technology of any kind...so it seems that your "full transparency" must include non-digital...which means at any time, my personal affects can be looked at by any person?
what about my business plans? do those get to be secret or does "full transparency" apply to those too?
"full transparency" is a totalitarian dream...so the answer is, if you loose your right to privacy, all the others follow...
can we end this line of questioning forever? privacy rights are a fundamental thing...no need for any techie "disruptive" "innovation"
Thank you Dave Raggett
exactly...so many of "teh singularity" type "futurists" who get to have their thoughts on this stuff published have absolutely no idea what they are talking about
anyone with a pacemaker or hearing aid is a "cyborg"
hell, it's "cybernetic" when you know your phone is ringing b/c you set it to vibrate...
Thank you Dave Raggett
Basic human right... the right against self-incrimination. Just because a sentient being incorporates mechnical and/or non-senient being into their physical being does not negate nor forfeit rights bestowed upon them by their maker.
And I don't even play a lawyer on TV.
...none?
I've watched enough Battlestar Galactica to know the importance of treating cyborgs well. There is a cycle that keeps repeating: humans (or some other life form) creates artificial sentient life form but treats it badly, like a slave race. The artificial life form rebels and begins to conquer its creators, but the artificial life cannot reproduce. That leads to some kind of joining between a faction of the artificial life with its creators for reproduction. The group of hybrids grows and prospers but forgets its origins and creates new artificial life. Repeat.
the persecution of scientists
the enforcement of taboos
the "war on drugs" and other states of mind
repression of political opposition to a regime in power
all live by stripping privacy
that's why
None of those are rules.
--Robert A, Heinlein, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Then you, sir, do not understand what a rule is.
Cyborgs aren't Humans?
... if our current attitude towards IT security doesn't change in a decade, my prediction is that the word "botnet" will be given a whole new meaning.
If it have enough brainpower to hire a good lawyer, it will most likely will be considered human, no matter if a cyborg, robot, bipedal fox created by the wrong kind of scientists...
I would imagine a cyborg to set a better example than a mere human.
This bullshit belongs on reddit not /.
I get sick of people having rights when they are criminals. I dont think that rights are as important as the truth. Now I say that and I dont want my rights trampled, but I am not a criminal and have nothing to lose to wear a camera and then show that 'evidence' to the law as it would just exonerate me. If you choose to have technology implanted or otherwise then there should be nothing wrong if the police GET a WARRANT and look at that 'evidence". I still think there should be a procedure and people still have rights. But if the police have a reasonable suspicion then there is nothing wrong with them compelling a person to show that data. The person being questioned if they are innocent shouldn't care anyway. The only one that would care is an actual guilty person and then they shouldn't be stupid enough to have implanted tech in the first place if that is their profession.I have seen alot of law and order episodes where the criminals have more rights than the victims and it is ridiculous. If you victimize others no matter the reason you should pay the price.
"Humans have too many privacy rights as it is. Groups like ISIS happen because we're more concerned about doing all of our daily tasks in secret rather than being safe." - by Anonymous Coward
Of course, if I had said something as stupid as that, would want to maintain my anonymity/privacy as well.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
She's eight foot two, solid blue
Five transistors in each shoe
Has anybody seen my gal?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Oh, well, that's an easy problem to solve, we can just simply round up all the persecutors and... OH SNAP, NOW YOU'VE GOT ME DOING IT!
But really, at what point can we just ignore the busybodies and come skulking out of the closet and be who we want to be and not give a fuck about what what other people think, because they don't have the power to do anything about it.
As far as living by everyone else's rules go, I probably have a good deal of privacy, but I still do it anyways. I don't veg out on video games as much as I'd like to, or pay people to perform sexual acts, even though those things are perfectly legal in places. But people are social creatures who learn from watching others, and naturally try to "fit in" whether their peers are giving them a hard time about it or not. Varying degrees of privacy might make it easier or harder for people to give you shit about stuff, but protection from other people is more of the essential right that should be guaranteed; having some sort of "guaranteed right to privacy" is delusional at best. If someone has some beef with you they'll be able to dig up some dirt.
Dangerous separation of terms.
The smart ones will erase the incrimating data.
Cyborgs that are too dumb to erase the incriminating data deserve what ever you do to guilts cyborgs.
That ends today's thought experiment.
Yeah, very idealistic, probably too much for homo sapiens, but maybe an advanced race of cybernetic organisms could handle it. Or perhaps they won't really have a choice since their black boxes could be subpoenaed.
Heh, as a parent, I would feel like a failure if there was something that my kids wouldn't feel comfortable confiding with me. But they're not yet teenagers, so we'll see. I suppose my own youth may have been atypical... brought home my first porn stash when I was 7 or something (someone left a bundle in the neighborhood playground trash can). My parents found it... and let me keep it. My mother was a fairly conservative asian, but my dad (who's pretty much that hippie perv uncle type) convinced her that if they were ever going to raise a medical doctor, I'd have to not be squeamish around "anatomy". So yeah, maybe not everyone would grow up with such, er, "understanding" parents, but it seems like with the internet and all, people are really opening up about formerly taboo topics and talking more comfortably about masturbation and menstruation and accepting of different viewpoints, if only because, hey, there are some real wackos out there. In all likelihood this trend will continue for at least a generation, until they rebel against it for reasons.
Yes, politics... it's a long shot, because people love to argue about this kind of stuff like it really matters to them personally, but idealistically that kind of thing will eventually relegate itself in status to "administrative overhead" which should be minimized so we can all just get on with our lives. Yes, politicians make it sound like it's the most important thing ever, because that's the only way they can get power in this world, and we let them. So there will always be people trying to assert their power over others, the question is how can we limit that. I don't think the answer is by trying to guarantee privacy, because as you mentioned, if someone really holds a beef against you, they'll be able to dig up some kind of dirt on you and control the narrative. Hell, even if that narrative is "hey, look at how carefully this guy guards his privacy, he uses the same level of encryption as the drug cartel bosses, he must be up to no good!" I think it's important for you (or perhaps your lawyer, if you're in it deep) to be able to control your own narrative, and that's where the greater transparency comes in.
I don't know if the matters of piracy and intellectual property will be with us that much longer into the future, esp. if we're considering the plight of cybernetic organisms. Already, we're kinda seeing the shift away from licensed reproduction and performances to a clamoring for mindshare.... fading away are the days where the Distributors of Popular Culture had to put earworms into your head by playing crap repetitively on broadcast radio, until you shell out money at them so you can listen to that earworm whenever you want to be reminded of that particular year of your life, like they own a part of your life and culture. Nowadays they're kinda losing the broadcast channel, and have to compete virally for eyeballs with a ton of other half-decent content, in order to deliver you to their advertisers. Or worse yet for them, artists can simply be crowdfunded directly, and paid to produce more of the type of content that people want.
Anyway, I and a ton of other people pirated a ton of content back in the day, back when my entertainment budget was closer to 0 than it is now. I've since been able to just avoid that content that wants to collect royalty fees. If they want to go back though the records and collect for "lost" sales, then sure, I suppose it's fair game, but I'd also expect them to settle for fair compensation and not the exorbitant legal sums they've been requesting. But enough on that digression.
Probably the more impactful "invasions" of privacy we'll be seeing are overlays of stuff that already exists... maybe an overlay that shows you all of the registered sex offenders you meet as you
Yeah, I think that it's possible (and that it's actually already happening) that society will become more accepting (and supporting!) of diversity. A healthy ecosystem is a diverse one, and is able to use and take advantage of the individual strengths of each of its members.
Shortly afterward, anyone with any intelligence would cease any public activities which did not meet general approval and start looking for ways to engage in them so that only other people with those hobbies would know about it - in effect, clamoring to restore the lost privacy.
Sounds like how many fairly common hobbies already exist. My dealer knows my hobby, but I have to go through great lengths to prevent the rest of the world from knowing because I face rather extreme persecution (since my particular hobby, despite being less lethal than some and less addictive than others, and identical in effect to certain legal products), is still a massive stigma, and not just legally.
Harder, but not impossible. It only depends on how much time and money you are willing to put into it. Is that just a google search or a complete 3 letter department?
Most of the time the three letter department will know, but either does not care, or wants to kleep it a secret. Just like the Enlish let cities be bombed as not to let the Germans know they had cracked the code.
When you are looking not at countries, but to companies, Google will know a LOT already. And not only via ads, but people use google fiber and/or their DNS servers. And then there is fingerprinting /. will know who you are, if they are interested.
so
As an individual it will be a bit harder, but people tend to write in a similar way, so you will be able to start recognising people after a while.
So what you must know is that NOTHING is anonymous on the Internet. Sure, most of the time nobody will go after you for saying "Niggers".
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
But they do have the power to do something about it.
For a good example, I loathe the catholic church. I think they are an outdated organisation that does far more harm than good, that their views on contraception are getting people killed, that their homophobia and misogyny are archaic and disgusting and that, while they proclaim themselves as a great charitable organisation, the fast wealth they flaunt given every chance tells another story. The cover-ups for pedophiles is just the icing on the evil cake.
My first job out of university was for a Catholic school.
If my employers had been able to read my posts about the church, there is no way I would have gotten that job. I'd likely have not gotten my job at another school later on either, because their legal advisor would caution against hiring someone who may later be accused of religious discrimination.
Sure, you could pass a law prohibiting discrimination in employment or services based on personal views - but it'd be very hard to enforce.
Yep.. all those things are true. But it was his choice to follow those rules since he knows those skills would give him a benefit in the world......
He could likewise live in a cave somewhere without any knowledge about computers and languages, but then he would probably had some issues posting here..
Good point... I don't think that kind of thing will be much of an issue, though, because corporations like to save money by hiring the lowest salary staff from the largest pool of potential employees as possible.
As much as I'd like to believe that workplace diversity policies were implemented purely for progressive civil rights reasons (and I do applaud some of the brilliant and talented HR reps that can make everyone and themselves believe it!) it's obviously in their interests to "overlook" a lot of stuff that might come up from a moderately extensive background check, if it helps them stuff more warm bodies into a chair for less money. The labor force will become much more like the mechanical turk... remote, faceless, unseen. Heck, we're already just a number. Then later on if something bad happens, they can just say "oh, how were we to know employee #4872030 was a psycho?"
Sure, maybe small time employers still lack the sense to do less extensive background research... so in that case, hope you only shared the stuff that's kosher! So in a sense, if you already assume we have full transparency and Someone is always watching what you're doing, you should already be in good shape.
Just as an aside, I did go to a Catholic school for a few years as a kid, and it wasn't that bad. Granted, it was an international school next to a US Embassy, though most of the US Embassy brats went to a more expensive international school across town. In retrospect it was pretty well run... We said the morning prayers (well, the glee club eventually started singing it) along with the national flag anthem during morning assembly, and other than that, there wasn't much religion. OK, actually there was also a religion class period, but you could choose to do the Catholic one, the Buddhist one, the Muslim one, or the Hindu one, or if you were just a dirty atheist/agnostic like me, you'd be lumped into the "Values" class which was essentially another social studies/psychology group. The only thing I remember is a picture in the textbook of two girls licking an ice cream cone together. We laughed our way through it then, but still, when I came back to the US school system, I felt that it was something that was missing here... there weren't really any classes that tried to teach you how to share and be nice and get along with others. So if you didn't get it from your parents or church, well, then you just don't get it here in the US. Huh.
Groups like ISIS happens due to several things..
(not in any order)
- Lack of education
- Religion
- Poverty
- Desperation (as in desperate for a "better" life)
The root-cause of why ISIS has been allowed to grow as they have is due to USA invading Irak and destroying most of the country leaving poor and desperate people in it's wake.
I remember another group that USA have been going after for a number of years now.. you know that they where trained and equipped by the CIA during the cold-war to help in fighting the Russians?
Leave other countries alone.. If they want to help then educate the population and let the countries change by themselves... If they have food then drop educational material, as in math/physics/chemistry/etc instead..
how awesome are the cyborgs tits? if super awesome, i should have all the pics.
Er, dude, I think his point was that people are too worried about what other people think about them and wouldn't it be nice if nobody gave a damn. Hey, I had a wank yesterday (actually I had 2) and I'm into mom porn. There you go - nothing to be embarrassed about. As for hiding things from your parents, it's another example of judgementalism. Judgementalism is at the heart of so many human-created evils in the world. Religious extremism - judgementalism based on not being willing to allow others to believe something different to you. Anti-gay discrimination - judgementalism again. Racism - judgementalism based on skin colour. Envy - judgementalism. You get my point.
Obviously it's idealistic to wish that all away, it's part of human nature. But just think, wouldn't it be nice if we could somehow concentrate on making the most of our own lives without judging others on how they live theirs?
Same at the one I went to - there was minimal catholic influence. We had a bishop in to speak once - discovered at the last minute that the portable projection screen we were going to set up in the churchy bit was broken, so I spent half an hour sitting behind it with one arm holding the screen in place.
It depends how many potential candidates there are. If there are more jobs than candidates, employers will have an incentive to overlook minorly undesireable traits to hire the best talant. But if there are many many candidates qualified for a job, who would you expect the employer to choose? The one with a history of insulting religion online, which some future customer could cite as evidence in a discrimination claim (Possibly an unjustified one, fishing for a settlement), or the one who has no strong opinions on anything?
Humans have too many privacy rights as it is.
Who said humans have ANY privacy rights. AfC The only privacy rights humans have are the ones we barely give lip service to.
Groups like ISIS happen because we're more concerned about doing all of our daily tasks in secret rather than being safe.
Groups like ISIS, and Governments in general, happen because of the inate human desire to be able to tell fellow human beings what to do, and how to think, and how to act. And make it stick. AfC
- X/Y -
Don't forget a lack of opportunity. It's very much easier to solicit young men for your cause that might kill them when they want a wife or girlfriend and cannot get one due to society's structure making that basically impossible for them. Suddenly the promise of women at the time of martyrdom becomes more appealing.
The United States is a bit of an aberration and we would do well to remember that. At our founding we were sparsely populated, had few neighbors who themselves were sparsely populated, and were facing large amounts of untamed wilderness. Our concept of manifest destiny effectively meant that if you wanted a say in affairs greater than your own, all you had to do was move west and set up your own place to govern, and if you look at the religious migrations that occurred, and the movement of immigrants that came through America's east-coast cities and kept traveling inland you can see how that played out.
Even still, we had our share of internal violence, with its strongest being the 1860s and the civil war. If you look at the propaganda from that war, The Battle Hymn of the Republic calls on men to fight for natural rights as a Godly cause; religion played a role in many of our decisions as a nation. Now I couldn't rightly say what Union or Confederate troops did to the civilian population beyond what we know about (ie, the burning of Atlanta) because I'm no historian, but given human nature I wouldn't be surprised if the lack of atrocities is simply a matter of documentation and no desire to show them off, versus them not occurring.
Back to my original point, Our country's creation and history is uniquely created by our geography, lack of population density, and the various mindsets of those that immigrated here and those that resettled. Our modern form of democratic republic reflects how disparate and diverse the perspectives and opinions are, and that abstraction layer in the form of elected representation is often overlooked in terms of how we feel and how we actually govern, and our most extreme citizens generally aren't represented in government. We're successful but we still have to pay attention to our fringe element, and fortunately that fringe element is fairly small.
We can't expect other countries to have the same circumstances as we do. Our kicking-over the anthill that was Iraq was a huge mistake, and while Saddam Hussein was not our friend, history has shown him to be the lesser of evils in the short term. He oppressed his people, and he killed those that sought to overthrow him, but he didn't kill those that simply believed in the same god but worshiped that god in a slightly different way. He couldn't have afforded to let religious extremism come out into the open because it was a threat to him, so he kept stomping it down. Don't get me wrong, he was a bad person, but not nearly so bad as what's spawned in his wake.
We need to remember the lessons of Iraq, and to not go around kicking over other dictators just because we don't like dictators. Take that cork out of the bottle and the whole thing explodes.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Thing is, if you're using services or technology that communicates with third-party systems, then you're not doing things where that tech is involved that are truly secret. The argument against allowing that data to be accessed has been fought and lost.
If you want your activities to be secret, don't involve technology that communicates with anyone else.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
That was pretty good, I admit. You've made it into the top ten list of the year for AC trolling.
No more than my computer should. The owner of the machine has the rights. Next question please.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
If that were true functioning socuety would seize to exist. This discussion reminds me about ones in the past long gone about anarchy and ideal society.
These concept of ideal state or society alway fails at two things. People have different hierarchy of values thus dagree not only on some things but also what are basic or core values (intelectual proprty, marihuana, abortion etc). Besides this showstopper assuming ideal society where we all are relaxed about everyone's drugs of choice does not take into account that we are not ideal and never will be. It does not take into account that things that are desirable in one situation are not acceptable in another. You can see this already by child porn. It is evil till your 12yo sends own naked photos around and some overzealous asshole starts prosecuting. People have to learn too and tital transparency combined with not removable evidence of our early stupidity may destry lives. Besides all this there are psychological arguments - our psyche needs shadow. If all our farts are recirded for eternity and everybody to see it is not good for our psyche. People tend to forget these small details.
"I wasn't born to be a slave or to follow your rules. My life is my own bitch."
Is your name Spartacus bychance? :)
Bullshit. Things like ISIS happen because government are to busy spying on things that doesn't matter to do something about groups like this.
If they where less interested in security measures that do not actually improve security and used the money to actually confront groups like ISIS, such organisations would not exist.
this is your problem...the fallacy of the belief that believing we can have privacy is a fallacy
we have privacy when we have laws protecting it...your suggestion means getting rid of those laws
maybe ***YOUR*** privacy rights do not exist or have become 'obsolete', but you cannot speak for me or any other person in that regard
**the rest of us still want our privacy rights, and just because you think that 'privacy doesn't exit' doesn't affect our rights**
i can still sue you or have you arrested if you break the law
Thank you Dave Raggett
A wise man, Benjamin Franklin, once said: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety - and will loose them both". You seem to fall in that category.
"... a thing that we invest with rights..." by that Benjamin Wittes seems to mean a human. The Founders believed that "rights" were given to us by God, and that we had to take care that the government did not take them from us. Wittes seems to have gone back to believing we [not God] "invested" those rights into humans. Even an Atheist [like me] could find that misguided.
Once something is part of your body, as opposed to something you can drop or take off without surgery, it is no longer a separate object and is immediately part of you, only being subject to the same laws that someone that has no cybernetics is subject to.
So no, the police could not download the data from your cybernetic memory anymore than they could from your biological memory.
There, see, easy solution just by recognizing one simple idea, your body is your own, no matter where it came from. That also applies to someone with transplanted organs or other parts from someone else, as they are nut subject to any benefits or penalties that the previous owner of that tissue once had. So you can't inherit from your heart donors rich aunt, you can't be thrown in jail for the robbery and murder committed by your face donor (yes, they've done a couple of those now), or the like.
Would be more interested in liability. Suppose a piece of electronics inside a person commits a crime, say... a prosthetic arm picking up a gun and shooting someone. And the bearer of that arm denies committing the act stating that the arm took a life of its own. Well, I could easily see that future prosthetics will be networked, and someone could hack the firmware to shoot a high profile target. Unlikely, but plausible. But the big question, who's liable?
We already have laws that govern when (and how) the data on our personal devices can be accessed. As technology becomes integrated into our bodies, the same laws will cover them.
What would your mitochondria do?
They don't get many opportunities to express themselves.
--
If you think this universe is bad, you should see some of the others - P K Dick
... Culture "Minds", drones, and humans/cyborgs all have privacy of what is in their own thoughts and memories. However, anything in a non-sentient "databank" is public to all (so, externally stored communications or designs in that sense are publicly shareable). I'm just re-reading "Excession" (out loud to my kid) where Banks made that point. In the "Culture", Banks makes it clear that sentient beings of any sort (including typical drones) have a variety of rights related to independence. When I first read that, coming from an idea of free software and free culture, it seemed somehow strange or wrong that the AI "Minds" or drones would have that sort of privacy, but now it seems to make more and more sense to me, given the sort of issues raised in the article, including that there can be many times when the line is blurred between human and machine. But the probably deeper issue is what it means to have an advanced post-scarcity "Culture" where many of the citizens are entirely non-biological (like the AI "Minds" that run much of everything).
BTW, the original "RUR" story from 1920 (where the term "robot" came from) has almost exactly the same plot as you outline for BG.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R....
A lot of long-term robotics (like Asimo) is implicitly the quest for the ideal "slave". The question is, at what points does something have rights? In the USA and elsewhere animals have some legal rights (or at least laws to protect them) since starting about a 150 years ago, and that campaign I've heard eventually led to children having independent rights (on the logic of, why should a horse or dog have rights when a child does not?).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://www.nal.usda.gov/awic/p...
"The first national law to regulate animal experimentation was passed in Britain in 1876--the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876. This bill created a central governing body that reviewed and approved all animal use in research. After that, there were numerous countries in Europe that adopted some regulations regarding research with animals. "
Also:
http://www.humanium.org/en/chi...
"At the beginning of the 20th century, children's protection starts to be put in place, including protection in the medical, social and judicial fields. This kind of protection starts first in France and spreads across Europe afterwards. Since 1919, the international community, following the creation of The League of Nations (later to become the UN), starts to give some kind of importance to that concept and elaborates a Committee for child protection."
However, going back to hunter/gatherer times thousands of years ago, there was in many such cultures (from what remains of them) at least an ethic of giving thanks to the larger "animal" kind (e.g. "Rabbit") that you killed for it letting you kill it so you might survive. But it's hard to know for sure what such cultures really believed day-to-day in all circumstances. And some such cultures had various sorts of slavery.
I don't know what the line is where a mechanism (mechanical or electronic or photonic or fluidic or other) becomes self-aware, or even if that should be the line. Or at what point can a mechanism feel "pain" or "pleasure"? Is that ultimately a political and/or religious question?
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/tec...
And also:
http://www.aspcr.com/
"We are the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots, founded in 1999 in Seattle, Washin
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
420 much?
remember donald sterling and brendan eich? imagine that but 100 fold... now imagine that but forever. The public is judgemental and hypocritical as it is. the first thing that would happen would be a fucking market crash as each fortune 500 would have to do some restructuring to find corporate officers pure as the driven snow...