It's a "little brother" approach, the typical way social systems worked in the old days in small towns, where the vandal's mother generally knew about the vandalism before the perp got home.
Yeah. Small towns are also well-known for their intolerance and xenophobia. The system works well for preventing small crimes, but it works just as well for preventing anything that contradicts the notions of propriety in this particular town. People who are different are shunned at best, killed at worst.
Having said this I see no problem with Kuro5hin blocking off ranges of IP addresses -- he is providing a free service and he can do anything he wants. He has no obligation to the unlucky souls who happen to be in the same subnet as the source of his problems.
don't tell people whether they have moderator status or not. Just let everyone moderate and ignore the actions of those who don't currently have the status.
Bad idea.
Moderation is a drain on my time: it is a service I perform as a member of a community. If I know that most of the time it will be pointless -- no more than empty mouseclicks -- I will not do it all.
Doesn't anyone else think that this PDA craze is getting out of hand? Sure, it's neat to have information in a small, portable form, but do we want to be "connected" 24/7?
You are confused. Your rant is, basically, against beepers and cell phones -- these are the devices that make you "connected" 24/7. PDAs are, ahem, somewhat different.
But who wants to have their address book, e-mail, pager, and ICQ attached to them, like some sort of crippling chain to their job?
Job??
Does your address book have only business contacts? Is your email 99% business-related? Is it only your boss or your customers that page you?
If so, my advice would be to get a life.
believe it or not, we don't need everything smaller and more pervasive.
I know a lot of women who would agree with you wholeheartedly.
From my reading, the message to which you were replying was asking whether "we have voted to live in a world full of beautiful, etc, people" The only way you can vote not to live in such a world, other than restricting someone else's actions, is to commit suicide, really..
Not any more than a "yes" vote means forcing everybody to be "beautiful, etc.".
Do you think these future humans with twisted spines, diseases, mental retardation, deformities, etc, etc, will THANK you for not allowing their parents to correct these things?
Not allowing? Where did you get this idea? I was not talking about what should be allowed and what should be prohibited. I just made an observation that a world composed of perpetually cheerful uniformly beautiful people who are always happy because their genetics will not allow them to be any other way doesn't strike me as a good place.
This is not an argument to forbig genetic meddling, far from it. It's more a counterpoint to the possibility of government-imposed mandatory happiness: "No, Ms.Smith, we cannot allow you to bear this baby to term because he is likely to be significantly below average in height and have slight autistic tendencies...". A bit of reflection (and reading of SF) should convince you that left to themselves a lot of people would choose pop-culture stereotypes, but a noticeable minority will choose something that will make an average Joe Schmoe blanch. And that is a good thing, too.
Our world is just not yet ready or responsible enough to handle such potent knowledge.
And just how would you know when the world is ready? Do you have a handy metric to measure the humanity's readiness for applied genetics? And who is going to make the judgement, anyway?
Unfortunately, you are mistaken. It's a legal issue. The reason why so many companies are shit-scared of sexual jokes is that they have been construed by courts as creating a hostile environment for women and so constituting sexual harassment. People from outside US find this very hard to believe, but it happens to be a fact.
Note that a women isn't going to sue you -- a poor salaried jerk -- she's going to sue the company ("deep pockets theory"). That is what's making companies so intolerable of sexual jokes.
Welcome to the politically-correct-and-don't-you-dare-not-like-it world.
First of all, steganography isn't limited to low bits of images by any means. There is a large number of ways to transmit information without being obvious about it.
Second, I doubt that you can detect if an image has something steg'ed in it (without having the original image, of course). Basically well-encrypted information is indistinguishable from random noise and you are essentially replacing one pseudo-random noise with another.
Having said that, there are sophisticated statistical techniques that could indicate that something is fishy with this particular image. If you suspect their use, you can adjust the statistical characteristics of your encrypted message to exactly match the characteristics of the original noise.
you might as well should out your e-mails in the street
Two words: hard crypto.
It has been pointed out many times that for properly encrypted communications the security of the channel is irrelevant. Yes, you could shout out the email in the street.
Any encryption available to most people could probably be broken given a sufficeint amount of time and resources which many governments have
The general consensus of the people in the know is that properly done hard crypto (say, 128-bit symmetric keys, 2048-bit private/public keys) are currently unbreakable by anybody regardless of the resources they might have.
AFAIK that's all Federal. In any case we were not talking about censorship -- we were talking about moral climate in the US. Somebody said that America sacrificed its freedom for dubious gains and another poster objected saying that christian-right weirdos are not America. While that is correct, a lot of rights have been sacrificed and I was making such a point.
[sexual jokes at workplace] These aren't free speech or censorship issues.
Correct, but again we are talking about moral climate, not censorship.
n short, you're trying to pigeonhole Americans with this carefully-cultivated mental image that is probably the result of reading too many religious trolls on Slashdot.
Well, well. The guys does make a few well-founded points, though. Please reflect on the following:
(1) What's going to be my minimum mandatory sentence if the cops find me with a couple of ounces of pot on me, or a dozen E tablets?
(2) What do you think will happen if I make a sexual joke at my workplace? If I email it to some of my colleagues?
Basing something on a book is technically copyright violation.
No, it's not. Even leaving aside fair use, ideas are not copyrightable. So don't pretend to be a hard-ass lawyer.
Who controlls the digital certificates?
So-called "certification authorities" (CAs). Who they would be is a subject of much debate.
Bah humbug. They own the computer, they dictate how it's used. Simple as that.
Not as simple as that. The poster correctly points out that finding, say, baseball statistics on the same computer would not have caused any problems at all. This is actually not a privacy story (other that the obvious moral: don't put personal stuff on other people's machines). This is a story about puritanical attitudes to sex and maintaining a facade of respectability.
But inappropriate use of company resources has always been a reason for firing somebody.
Don't be anal-retentive. Receiving a personal email on a company machine is, technically, inappropriate use of company resoures. Ditto reading Slashdot and a bunch of other stuff. I can assure you that a company that will fire people for sending/receiving personal non-offensive emails at work will soon find itself with a severe personnel problem. Send/receive a sexually explicit message, though, and things can get ugly very quickly. So, again, it's mostly not about privacy but about attitudes to sex.
However, people lost there individuality to the collective many moons ago
Speak for yourself.
The price of popular culture is losing yourself.
Is it really? Sometimes I eat at McDonalds, occasionally I listen to bubblegum pop music (so, shoot me), and I have been known to watch popular movies. So how does it make me lose myself?
I have to disagree that the increasing intrusion of the media into the lives of politicians and public figures is a bad thing, at least for the rest of us. These people accept that they are to have their lives scrutinised to a far greater extent than normal people - it's part and parcel of being in the public eye.
What you say is true, but there is also the price to be paid. A lot of people who would have made excellent leaders and public figures avoid stepping into limelight for precisely that reason: they do not want their private life ripped to shreds by nasty people looking for any dirt they could find.
As usual, it's a matter of balance: allow people in power to hide their business and corruption will flourish. Strip them of any privacy and no decent person will want to become one. Hard separation between public and personal might help, but it's somewhat unnatural and not likely to work well. I don't think there is a good solution.
As for "the legal system" preventing use of technology to invade your privacy, haw. Tell that to the Republicans that Clinton obtained the FBI files on (for instance). As if the government is some kind of shining bastion of ethical purity.
The issue is of scale. If the FBI (or CIA or NSA or...) really really wants to find out what brand of toilet paper you use and how often you jerk off, it can. Legalities aren't going to stop it. But it can do this in special, exceptional cases. It cannot do this to a hundred thousand people just in case. Government always did and will continue to do illegal things. But it does them in small bits and pieces. I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn that the FBI wiretapped somebody without a court order. I would be very much surprised if somebody told me that the FBI wiretapped the whole population of Washington, DC. That is the difference that the legality makes.
Outlawing technology because it can be used for nefarious purposes is never a good idea.
That's a straw man. I never argued for outlawing the technology. I argues for limiting certain uses by certain entities. For example, I see little point in trying to outlaw automatic face recognition from street video cameras. But I see a lot of point in legally prohibiting police departments from doing this.
When there is no way to ensure personal privacy, it's a good idea to ensure that the people who would invade it have no privacy either.
The same old point -- I don't think it compensates in any way. Let me ask you: because Jenny put a webcam in her apartment, does she now have a right to come into your home and put a webcam there? Can she invade your privacy because she has none?
Nonsense. No set of statistics and information can encompass all the data required to predict what somone is going to do in any given situation
You'll be surprised. One of the functions of intelligence agencies around the world is predicting how key players are going to react to event. They have psychologists on the staff who read thick dossiers full of personal info and then forecast what would the person do in a given situation. That's rather routine and even if you can never get 100% accuracy, say, a ~70% batting average wouldn't be too bad, would it?
Unless of course you're a hardcore sociobiologist
What does sociobiology has to do with this? We are not talking about DNA.
And we should let our biological urges rule us then?
It's not a choice we have. You seem to believe in a Rousseau-like theory of mankind: there are base animalistic urges which the civilized man must control and eventually overcome. I can assure you it's much more complicated than that.
Making biological arguments is rediculous, technology has allowed us to go beyond what our genes would have us do.
Did technology help you get rid of your instinct of self-preservation? Or or need for security and approval? Will technology negate the love of parents for their children?
the Japanese place far less emphasis on privacy
You are mistaken. Japanese are very private people -- it's just that they are private about different things. The famous (or notorious) Japanese politeness, correctness and formality: this is a shield to preserve the privacy inside their heads.
But without security anyone can choose to do whatever they like to you and get away with it. What kind of freedom is that?
Nobody is arguing for anarchy (at least not me). Freedom and security/accountability/restrictions must be balanced against each other. Our disagreement is about the point of the correct balance: I believe you want to balance it at a point I call totalitarian.
David Brin's premise, which I am also using, is that technology combined with power is and will erode personal privacy, and there's nothing we can do about that.
You are a bit confused. Your original statement was "losing personal privacy is OK if everybody else, specifically government, loses it too". My response was "no, it's not OK, and you can and should get government accountability without sacrificing personal privacy". Now you are saying "See, we are going to lose personal privacy anyway, so if we get government accountability into the bargain, this is not bad".
First of all, my point is that it is bad anyway. I am not a big fan of the "if you are going to be raped anyway, just relax and enjoy it" thinking. I do NOT think that making government transparent will in any shape or form compensate me for the loss of my privacy. Accountability of people in power is one thing, loss of personal privacy is another thing and I still don't see why you think they net each other out.
Second, I don't think that the loss of privacy is inevitable. Yes, technology is coming and one cannot stop it. But one can perfectly well stop its use by the government and law enforcement. Think about wiretaps. For a long time there has been technical capability to wiretap thousands and tens of thousands of people. Yet court-sanctioned wiretaps in the US number in hundreds per year. This is a straightforward example of privacy-invading technology being held in check by the legal system. I am not saying the same thing will happen to all the new technologies, but I don't see total surveillance as inevitable.
outlawing it creates the police state we want to avoid.
How come? If you outlaw, say, automatic face recognition and cross-referencing of personal information databases except by court order, how does this create the police state?
The answer is, turn the cameras back on the cameramen.
That's exactly my point: this is NOT the answer. To repeat myself, your loss of privacy does not compensate me for my loss of privacy.
I do? Your whole post was based on the idea that privacy means hiding one's information.
concept of choosing to keep your personal data private is becoming outdated.
It's not a concept, it's a value. Different people think different things are important. Some people think their privacy is important, some don't. I guess what you are trying to say is that over time more people will decide that their privacy is not important to them. I disagree.
Sure, I'm advocating a choice here, otherwise that'd be rather totalitarian wouldn't it?
Sure? You seem to be rather fond of totalitarian solutions to problems, so no, I'm not sure.
Privacy is a product of today's society rather than being an inherent right. It's got a lot to do with the hang-ups that people have when it comes to their personal life. The Puritans have a lot to answer for IMHO.
That's not true. You seem to equate privacy with nobody knowing whom you fucked last night and what's your favorite position is. That's really a small and not very important part of privacy. Consider these two points instead:
(1) Information is power. If I know a lot about you, I can forecast what you will do in a given situation. I will know how to manipulate you and what buttons to push to get the response I need. Surrendering privacy means becoming powerless.
(2) I would link privacy to territoriality: both have the idea "this is mine and you can't have it". And territoriality is biologically determined in humans -- you cannot say that this is a product of some specific society.
Wait till direct neural interfaces become available
Have been reading too much cyberpunk recently? In any case, that has nothing to do with the present problems we have.
Security != police state. I'm not in favour of totalitarian police powers, just giving law enforcement agencies an advantage over criminals.
A lot of security == police state. Security is intrinsically opposed to freedom because security is about setting limits and predictability -- both necessary is certain amounts, but both limiting freedom.
And are you saying that now law enforcement does NOT have an advantage over criminals? Besides, I think that you are in favor of totalitarian police powers, you just don't like the label.
We're not talking to private citizens here. We're talking about people in power. Wouldn't you like to see your FBI file? Shouldn't you be able to? I'd say yes.
Yes, but why do I have to surrender my privacy to do it?
David Brin and you seem to make the assumption that the government can be made transparent and accountable only if the citizens' privacy is destroyed as well. Why? Yes, I think that people in power should have less privacy that "normal" people. Yes, I think that government should be accountable, to a certain limit (I want neither rule by mob, nor rule by opinion polls). That's all fine. But what does this all have to do with stripping my privacy?
IMO, summing up, online retailers can collect information about me... [snip]... And I think I can be reasonably comfortable online with that.
There is a slight problem with your analogy to the bricks-and-mortar world. In the physical world helpful salesperson saw what you were interested in and showed you something. Fine. Five minutes, or a day, or a week passes and he forgets all about it. In the online world your preferences and choices go into a database and, as far as you are concerned, stay there for eternity. That's not good and that's a big part of what makes data collection so dangerous.
"Now, Mr.Smith, I see it that ten years ago you were in the habit of buying at least a pack of condoms a week and a lot of alcohol. That leads me to question your moral standards and the suitability for this position. By the way, around that time you bought several bongs -- can you explain to me what a bong is and what do you use it for?"
But it seems to me that privacy as a concept is somewhat outdated
You don't understand what privacy is. It is not hiding any and all information about yourself. Privacy is control over personal information. It means *I* get to choose who knows what about me.
In order to personalise such medicines drug companies are going to require your DNA profile. Are you willing to give up on advances like this for the sake of some nebulous concept like privacy?
If I get to choose whether to submit my DNA profile (understanding I'll get a worse/none medicine if I don't), then I have no objection. If everybody is required to submit their DNA "for the public good" whether they want it or not, privacy has been violated.
More personal information is the key to any number of services and advances that will benefit you as an individual rather than being for the use of a generic person
Again, it's all fine as long as I get to choose whether I want to play these games. I have no objection to any "opt-in" schemes: some people don't need privacy at all (Jennycam, etc.)
threats to your personal safety and freedom are moving from the physical world to the internet.
Threats to my personal safety are moving to the internet? Huh? Let's say my machine gets owned and my hard drive published for all and sundry to see. What does it have to do with personal safety?
Thanks to the banner of privacy, criminals can hack your details with a much greater chance of getting away with it than if the internet is logged, verified and secured.
You are arguing for a police state. You seem to like the idea of living in a police state. That's a value choice and cannot really be argued.
I'm all in favor of giving law enforcement all the tools they say they need and they say they want under one condition: The more they get, the more light shines into them
I fail to see how the loss of somebody else's privacy compensates you for the loss of your own.
The fact that I am not an exhibitionist does not imply that I am a voyer.
It's like agreeing to be kicked in the face once in a while provided that other members of the society also get kicked at least as often.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a "little brother" approach, the typical way social systems worked in the old days in small towns, where the vandal's mother generally knew about the vandalism before the perp got home.
Yeah. Small towns are also well-known for their intolerance and xenophobia. The system works well for preventing small crimes, but it works just as well for preventing anything that contradicts the notions of propriety in this particular town. People who are different are shunned at best, killed at worst.
Having said this I see no problem with Kuro5hin blocking off ranges of IP addresses -- he is providing a free service and he can do anything he wants. He has no obligation to the unlucky souls who happen to be in the same subnet as the source of his problems.
Kaa
don't tell people whether they have moderator status or not. Just let everyone moderate and ignore the actions of those who don't currently have the status.
Bad idea.
Moderation is a drain on my time: it is a service I perform as a member of a community. If I know that most of the time it will be pointless -- no more than empty mouseclicks -- I will not do it all.
Kaa
Doesn't anyone else think that this PDA craze is getting out of hand? Sure, it's neat to have information in a small, portable form, but do we want to be "connected" 24/7?
You are confused. Your rant is, basically, against beepers and cell phones -- these are the devices that make you "connected" 24/7. PDAs are, ahem, somewhat different.
But who wants to have their address book, e-mail, pager, and ICQ attached to them, like some sort of crippling chain to their job?
Job??
Does your address book have only business contacts? Is your email 99% business-related? Is it only your boss or your customers that page you?
If so, my advice would be to get a life.
believe it or not, we don't need everything smaller and more pervasive.
I know a lot of women who would agree with you wholeheartedly.
Kaa
"Who would want to emulate Windows CE's interface?"
And perchance, do you happen to know of a good touch- (and tap-) based interface? On any OS, never mind Linux?
And yes, Palm-type interface is good for simple things, but only for simple things.
Kaa
From my reading, the message to which you were replying was asking whether "we have voted to live in a world full of beautiful, etc, people" The only way you can vote not to live in such a world, other than restricting someone else's actions, is to commit suicide, really..
Not any more than a "yes" vote means forcing everybody to be "beautiful, etc.".
Kaa
Do you think these future humans with twisted spines, diseases, mental retardation, deformities, etc, etc, will THANK you for not allowing their parents to correct these things?
Not allowing? Where did you get this idea? I was not talking about what should be allowed and what should be prohibited. I just made an observation that a world composed of perpetually cheerful uniformly beautiful people who are always happy because their genetics will not allow them to be any other way doesn't strike me as a good place.
This is not an argument to forbig genetic meddling, far from it. It's more a counterpoint to the possibility of government-imposed mandatory happiness: "No, Ms.Smith, we cannot allow you to bear this baby to term because he is likely to be significantly below average in height and have slight autistic tendencies...". A bit of reflection (and reading of SF) should convince you that left to themselves a lot of people would choose pop-culture stereotypes, but a noticeable minority will choose something that will make an average Joe Schmoe blanch. And that is a good thing, too.
Kaa
Our world is just not yet ready or responsible enough to handle such potent knowledge.
And just how would you know when the world is ready? Do you have a handy metric to measure the humanity's readiness for applied genetics? And who is going to make the judgement, anyway?
Kaa
"Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants to live in a world with only healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive inhabitants."
:)
;-\
I vote "Yes."
You mean smurfs, don't you?
Most of the world's greatest art and many scientific breakthroughs were made by obsessive maladjusted freaks.
I vote "No".
Kaa
It's a productivity issue, not a morality issue.
t world.
Unfortunately, you are mistaken. It's a legal issue. The reason why so many companies are shit-scared of sexual jokes is that they have been construed by courts as creating a hostile environment for women and so constituting sexual harassment. People from outside US find this very hard to believe, but it happens to be a fact.
Note that a women isn't going to sue you -- a poor salaried jerk -- she's going to sue the company ("deep pockets theory"). That is what's making companies so intolerable of sexual jokes.
Welcome to the politically-correct-and-don't-you-dare-not-like-i
Kaa
And, it's possible to detect steg'ed images.
First of all, steganography isn't limited to low bits of images by any means. There is a large number of ways to transmit information without being obvious about it.
Second, I doubt that you can detect if an image has something steg'ed in it (without having the original image, of course). Basically well-encrypted information is indistinguishable from random noise and you are essentially replacing one pseudo-random noise with another.
Having said that, there are sophisticated statistical techniques that could indicate that something is fishy with this particular image. If you suspect their use, you can adjust the statistical characteristics of your encrypted message to exactly match the characteristics of the original noise.
Kaa
you might as well should out your e-mails in the street
Two words: hard crypto.
It has been pointed out many times that for properly encrypted communications the security of the channel is irrelevant. Yes, you could shout out the email in the street.
Kaa
Any encryption available to most people could probably be broken given a sufficeint amount of time and resources which many governments have
The general consensus of the people in the know is that properly done hard crypto (say, 128-bit symmetric keys, 2048-bit private/public keys) are currently unbreakable by anybody regardless of the resources they might have.
Kaa
Depends on your local laws.
AFAIK that's all Federal. In any case we were not talking about censorship -- we were talking about moral climate in the US. Somebody said that America sacrificed its freedom for dubious gains and another poster objected saying that christian-right weirdos are not America. While that is correct, a lot of rights have been sacrificed and I was making such a point.
[sexual jokes at workplace] These aren't free speech or censorship issues.
Correct, but again we are talking about moral climate, not censorship.
Kaa
n short, you're trying to pigeonhole Americans with this carefully-cultivated mental image that is probably the result of reading too many religious trolls on Slashdot.
Well, well. The guys does make a few well-founded points, though. Please reflect on the following:
(1) What's going to be my minimum mandatory sentence if the cops find me with a couple of ounces of pot on me, or a dozen E tablets?
(2) What do you think will happen if I make a sexual joke at my workplace? If I email it to some of my colleagues?
Kaa
Basing something on a book is technically copyright violation.
No, it's not. Even leaving aside fair use, ideas are not copyrightable. So don't pretend to be a hard-ass lawyer.
Who controlls the digital certificates?
So-called "certification authorities" (CAs). Who they would be is a subject of much debate.
Bah humbug. They own the computer, they dictate how it's used. Simple as that.
Not as simple as that. The poster correctly points out that finding, say, baseball statistics on the same computer would not have caused any problems at all. This is actually not a privacy story (other that the obvious moral: don't put personal stuff on other people's machines). This is a story about puritanical attitudes to sex and maintaining a facade of respectability.
But inappropriate use of company resources has always been a reason for firing somebody.
Don't be anal-retentive. Receiving a personal email on a company machine is, technically, inappropriate use of company resoures. Ditto reading Slashdot and a bunch of other stuff. I can assure you that a company that will fire people for sending/receiving personal non-offensive emails at work will soon find itself with a severe personnel problem. Send/receive a sexually explicit message, though, and things can get ugly very quickly. So, again, it's mostly not about privacy but about attitudes to sex.
However, people lost there individuality to the collective many moons ago
Speak for yourself.
The price of popular culture is losing yourself.
Is it really? Sometimes I eat at McDonalds, occasionally I listen to bubblegum pop music (so, shoot me), and I have been known to watch popular movies. So how does it make me lose myself?
Kaa
I have to disagree that the increasing intrusion of the media into the lives of politicians and public figures is a bad thing, at least for the rest of us. These people accept that they are to have their lives scrutinised to a far greater extent than normal people - it's part and parcel of being in the public eye.
What you say is true, but there is also the price to be paid. A lot of people who would have made excellent leaders and public figures avoid stepping into limelight for precisely that reason: they do not want their private life ripped to shreds by nasty people looking for any dirt they could find.
As usual, it's a matter of balance: allow people in power to hide their business and corruption will flourish. Strip them of any privacy and no decent person will want to become one. Hard separation between public and personal might help, but it's somewhat unnatural and not likely to work well. I don't think there is a good solution.
Kaa
That I wanted to know was if anyone could think of a good anonymous algorithm for exchanging money online
Search on the net for "David Chaum". Also, Applied Cryptography has some useful algorithms.
David Chaum tried to set up an anonymous electronic money system. His company was called Digicash (AFAIK). He failed. I think the main reasons were:
(1) There is no burning need for anonymous electronic money among the general public.
(2) Governments dislike this idea very much for obvious reasons.
(3) Chaum kept the technology very close to his vest and was unwilling to seed/share it widely so that it jumpstarts.
Kaa
As for "the legal system" preventing use of technology to invade your privacy, haw. Tell that to the Republicans that Clinton obtained the FBI files on (for instance). As if the government is some kind of shining bastion of ethical purity.
...) really really wants to find out what brand of toilet paper you use and how often you jerk off, it can. Legalities aren't going to stop it. But it can do this in special, exceptional cases. It cannot do this to a hundred thousand people just in case. Government always did and will continue to do illegal things. But it does them in small bits and pieces. I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn that the FBI wiretapped somebody without a court order. I would be very much surprised if somebody told me that the FBI wiretapped the whole population of Washington, DC. That is the difference that the legality makes.
The issue is of scale. If the FBI (or CIA or NSA or
Outlawing technology because it can be used for nefarious purposes is never a good idea.
That's a straw man. I never argued for outlawing the technology. I argues for limiting certain uses by certain entities. For example, I see little point in trying to outlaw automatic face recognition from street video cameras. But I see a lot of point in legally prohibiting police departments from doing this.
When there is no way to ensure personal privacy, it's a good idea to ensure that the people who would invade it have no privacy either.
The same old point -- I don't think it compensates in any way. Let me ask you: because Jenny put a webcam in her apartment, does she now have a right to come into your home and put a webcam there? Can she invade your privacy because she has none?
Kaa
Nonsense. No set of statistics and information can encompass all the data required to predict what somone is going to do in any given situation
You'll be surprised. One of the functions of intelligence agencies around the world is predicting how key players are going to react to event. They have psychologists on the staff who read thick dossiers full of personal info and then forecast what would the person do in a given situation. That's rather routine and even if you can never get 100% accuracy, say, a ~70% batting average wouldn't be too bad, would it?
Unless of course you're a hardcore sociobiologist
What does sociobiology has to do with this? We are not talking about DNA.
And we should let our biological urges rule us then?
It's not a choice we have. You seem to believe in a Rousseau-like theory of mankind: there are base animalistic urges which the civilized man must control and eventually overcome. I can assure you it's much more complicated than that.
Making biological arguments is rediculous, technology has allowed us to go beyond what our genes would have us do.
Did technology help you get rid of your instinct of self-preservation? Or or need for security and approval? Will technology negate the love of parents for their children?
the Japanese place far less emphasis on privacy
You are mistaken. Japanese are very private people -- it's just that they are private about different things. The famous (or notorious) Japanese politeness, correctness and formality: this is a shield to preserve the privacy inside their heads.
But without security anyone can choose to do whatever they like to you and get away with it. What kind of freedom is that?
Nobody is arguing for anarchy (at least not me). Freedom and security/accountability/restrictions must be balanced against each other. Our disagreement is about the point of the correct balance: I believe you want to balance it at a point I call totalitarian.
Kaa
David Brin's premise, which I am also using, is that technology combined with power is and will erode personal privacy, and there's nothing we can do about that.
You are a bit confused. Your original statement was "losing personal privacy is OK if everybody else, specifically government, loses it too". My response was "no, it's not OK, and you can and should get government accountability without sacrificing personal privacy". Now you are saying "See, we are going to lose personal privacy anyway, so if we get government accountability into the bargain, this is not bad".
First of all, my point is that it is bad anyway. I am not a big fan of the "if you are going to be raped anyway, just relax and enjoy it" thinking. I do NOT think that making government transparent will in any shape or form compensate me for the loss of my privacy. Accountability of people in power is one thing, loss of personal privacy is another thing and I still don't see why you think they net each other out.
Second, I don't think that the loss of privacy is inevitable. Yes, technology is coming and one cannot stop it. But one can perfectly well stop its use by the government and law enforcement. Think about wiretaps. For a long time there has been technical capability to wiretap thousands and tens of thousands of people. Yet court-sanctioned wiretaps in the US number in hundreds per year. This is a straightforward example of privacy-invading technology being held in check by the legal system. I am not saying the same thing will happen to all the new technologies, but I don't see total surveillance as inevitable.
outlawing it creates the police state we want to avoid.
How come? If you outlaw, say, automatic face recognition and cross-referencing of personal information databases except by court order, how does this create the police state?
The answer is, turn the cameras back on the cameramen.
That's exactly my point: this is NOT the answer. To repeat myself, your loss of privacy does not compensate me for my loss of privacy.
Kaa
You know full well what I meant
I do? Your whole post was based on the idea that privacy means hiding one's information.
concept of choosing to keep your personal data private is becoming outdated.
It's not a concept, it's a value. Different people think different things are important. Some people think their privacy is important, some don't. I guess what you are trying to say is that over time more people will decide that their privacy is not important to them. I disagree.
Sure, I'm advocating a choice here, otherwise that'd be rather totalitarian wouldn't it?
Sure? You seem to be rather fond of totalitarian solutions to problems, so no, I'm not sure.
Privacy is a product of today's society rather than being an inherent right. It's got a lot to do with the hang-ups that people have when it comes to their personal life. The Puritans have a lot to answer for IMHO.
That's not true. You seem to equate privacy with nobody knowing whom you fucked last night and what's your favorite position is. That's really a small and not very important part of privacy. Consider these two points instead:
(1) Information is power. If I know a lot about you, I can forecast what you will do in a given situation. I will know how to manipulate you and what buttons to push to get the response I need. Surrendering privacy means becoming powerless.
(2) I would link privacy to territoriality: both have the idea "this is mine and you can't have it". And territoriality is biologically determined in humans -- you cannot say that this is a product of some specific society.
Wait till direct neural interfaces become available
Have been reading too much cyberpunk recently? In any case, that has nothing to do with the present problems we have.
Security != police state. I'm not in favour of totalitarian police powers, just giving law enforcement agencies an advantage over criminals.
A lot of security == police state. Security is intrinsically opposed to freedom because security is about setting limits and predictability -- both necessary is certain amounts, but both limiting freedom.
And are you saying that now law enforcement does NOT have an advantage over criminals? Besides, I think that you are in favor of totalitarian police powers, you just don't like the label.
Kaa
We're not talking to private citizens here. We're talking about people in power. Wouldn't you like to see your FBI file? Shouldn't you be able to? I'd say yes.
Yes, but why do I have to surrender my privacy to do it?
David Brin and you seem to make the assumption that the government can be made transparent and accountable only if the citizens' privacy is destroyed as well. Why? Yes, I think that people in power should have less privacy that "normal" people. Yes, I think that government should be accountable, to a certain limit (I want neither rule by mob, nor rule by opinion polls). That's all fine. But what does this all have to do with stripping my privacy?
Kaa
IMO, summing up, online retailers can collect information about me... [snip] ... And I think I can be reasonably comfortable online with that.
There is a slight problem with your analogy to the bricks-and-mortar world. In the physical world helpful salesperson saw what you were interested in and showed you something. Fine. Five minutes, or a day, or a week passes and he forgets all about it. In the online world your preferences and choices go into a database and, as far as you are concerned, stay there for eternity. That's not good and that's a big part of what makes data collection so dangerous.
"Now, Mr.Smith, I see it that ten years ago you were in the habit of buying at least a pack of condoms a week and a lot of alcohol. That leads me to question your moral standards and the suitability for this position. By the way, around that time you bought several bongs -- can you explain to me what a bong is and what do you use it for?"
Kaa
But it seems to me that privacy as a concept is somewhat outdated
You don't understand what privacy is. It is not hiding any and all information about yourself. Privacy is control over personal information. It means *I* get to choose who knows what about me.
In order to personalise such medicines drug companies are going to require your DNA profile. Are you willing to give up on advances like this for the sake of some nebulous concept like privacy?
If I get to choose whether to submit my DNA profile (understanding I'll get a worse/none medicine if I don't), then I have no objection. If everybody is required to submit their DNA "for the public good" whether they want it or not, privacy has been violated.
More personal information is the key to any number of services and advances that will benefit you as an individual rather than being for the use of a generic person
Again, it's all fine as long as I get to choose whether I want to play these games. I have no objection to any "opt-in" schemes: some people don't need privacy at all (Jennycam, etc.)
threats to your personal safety and freedom are moving from the physical world to the internet.
Threats to my personal safety are moving to the internet? Huh? Let's say my machine gets owned and my hard drive published for all and sundry to see. What does it have to do with personal safety?
Thanks to the banner of privacy, criminals can hack your details with a much greater chance of getting away with it than if the internet is logged, verified and secured.
You are arguing for a police state. You seem to like the idea of living in a police state. That's a value choice and cannot really be argued.
Kaa
I'm all in favor of giving law enforcement all the tools they say they need and they say they want under one condition: The more they get, the more light shines into them
I fail to see how the loss of somebody else's privacy compensates you for the loss of your own.
The fact that I am not an exhibitionist does not imply that I am a voyer.
It's like agreeing to be kicked in the face once in a while provided that other members of the society also get kicked at least as often.
Kaa