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Rick Falkvinge, founder of the original Pirate Party, now living in Germany, has published four parts so far of series on analog equivalent privacy rights. He plans to have 21 parts in all. The series starts out early on with the point that there is no reason for the offline liberties of our parents to not be carried over into the same online liberties for our children and examines this point from different directions. So far he has posted in detail on the following topics over at Private Internet Access' blog:
- Our children should have the same rights as our parents
- The analog, anonymous letter
- Posting an Anonymous Public Message
- Our children have lost Privacy of Location
Rick will post more over the next few weeks. The current batch of adults and teenagers are likely the last generation to have any choice in the matter. Apathy and ignorance abound and deciding not to decide is still, sadly, a choice.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Tuesday December 19 2017, @07:51AM (3 children)
Anyone has always had the capacity to snoop on someone else, although it was expensive to do so, and usually involved a private investigator.
Today, digging up dirt on someone is extremely easy, if you know of some internet data aggregating websites. Like SearchQuarry and Spokeo for example.
If you are aggregating a bad reputation, it is going to be harder and harder for you to come out smelling like a rose, no matter what you say or wear.
Mixed bag here... for one thing, its getting quite easy to cross-reference anyone you have an interest in, and use that to help you decide whether or not to dig yourself in further. But then, things like revenge porn and submitting false bad stuff into the system also becomes possible.
Mixed bag of goodies here. And the cat is out of the bag.
Mommas don't have to worry about where their kids are, if she has them on "electronic leashes". But then other people can snoop as well. But they have always been able to snoop anyway, just not as easily or covertly, or done by script.
I am talking as an old fart here, knowing things as they had been. I accept this new technology as offering a lot of good things, but it comes with a lot of bad things too. So was fire, or the invention of the firearm.
I guess a lot of this comes to don't make waves, don't stand out, as making yourself a center of attention is apt to draw some unwanted attention. Just lay low and do a good job, don't push the law, and you look like you will come out ahead.
But then, its always been that way. What goes around comes around faster these days.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @10:44AM
Yeah, that's typically the behaviour you show to survive under a repressive regime. The difference is that now the repressive regime consists of the entire public.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Tuesday December 19 2017, @02:14PM
Other problems arise from interactions with the legal system. The benefit of this easy-to-investigate circumstance is that when someone is an actual threat, you can learn about it and practice various avoidance measures.
However, not all listed interactions actually indicate legitimate threats. From there, an entire cascade of problems arise.
There are those who are falsely accused and subsequently convicted. Such individuals are not threats; they are victims. Those who use the never-forgotten event to triage those individuals are then perpetrators of evil. We know of many severe cases where DNA evidence has exonerated the wrongfully convicted – but such exoneration is costly and difficult, and we know that many more wrongful convictions have occurred.
There are plea bargains where the accused, legitimately fearing a dangerously capricious legal outcome, took the plea to trade a known not-as-bad outcome for the potential of a very-bad outcome, and so are convicted by their own hand, as it were, yet not actually guilty of the accusation. Aside from the issue of the risks at hand at the time, which are extraordinarily difficult to assess unless one is directly involved, the person taking the plea bargain likely had an insufficient understanding of just how much a conviction will actually affect their life going forward.
There are those who are actually guilty, but the circumstances are such that it's irrelevant to anyone else; for instance, yes, they did X to Y, but Y had to be stopped from doing Z at the time, but this was not provable, etc. There are many circumstances where whatever happened is irrelevant to anyone but those directly involved, and in fact are pendant more upon your good behavior than the behavior of the person under investigation. For instance, never threaten to physically injure anyone's family, and never fear a person who has been known to rise to defend them violently in such a case.
There is the issue of rehabilitation: X did indeed do Y, but that was then, and this is now, and X is no longer inclined that way. In a world where no error or misstep goes forgotten, the nature of rehabilitation shrinks to comprise a continually more constrained set of opportunities, while outside that set, the ever-increasing number of closed doors comprise endless, ever-increasing retribution. The problem here is that the punishment that the legal system imposes is no longer the entire punishment; in fact, it may not even be the significant part of the punishment.
There are the mommy/sin/repression laws: X was indeed smoking a joint or selling sex or peacefully protesting "without a permit" or riding at the front of the bus, but these laws are inherently wrongful, the result of corruption of the legislative process by those who think they have a right to force consenting, informed adults into limits of what they may do with themselves and others and away from equitable use of public space and resources. They certainly do not. They have the power because the legislative system is inherently broken at this time, but such a right cannot arise except as an adjunct to slavery, indenture, or chattel.
It is not at all clear that the aggregation of all information, regardless of how harmful, in trivially accessible form accrues more to the positive side of the social ledger in general. In specific, we know that it is extremely damaging. From my POV, it's far better to leave a carefully measured retribution to the legal system, while encouraging society at large to rehabilitate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @02:23PM
You 'The problem would be hard to fix, so let's just give up.' people have been a major hindrance for every serious reform throughout history. Instead of giving up, we need to push for real privacy laws in this country, and decrease the amount of data that is released to the general public. The good aspects of these technologies are not as important as reclaiming our privacy. Trying to stop every bad person will just lead to a hopelessly repressive society.