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Privacy and the Future
The discussion on the recent Software Testing episode about Google Glass's applications being restricted has gotten me thinking a bit about privacy and the availability of information now and in the future. Recent reports on government surveillance bills and demanding records from cell phone companies led to further speculation. I'd like to get a sounding from this forum and especially Rym and Scott on some of this.
The position of the GeekNights hosts has been pretty consistent: information is public, privacy is going away, there is no stopping it so get used to it. I'm curious to get a few more details here. If you are ok with constant video surveillance from everyone with Google Glass, are you also ok with government monitoring of email, cell phone calls, warrantless wiretaps and the like? Is it simply a matter of inevitability, or is there some philosophical reason why this sort of thing is ok? If this is not ok, then why is it ok that privacy in general is going the way of the dodo?
The position of the GeekNights hosts has been pretty consistent: information is public, privacy is going away, there is no stopping it so get used to it. I'm curious to get a few more details here. If you are ok with constant video surveillance from everyone with Google Glass, are you also ok with government monitoring of email, cell phone calls, warrantless wiretaps and the like? Is it simply a matter of inevitability, or is there some philosophical reason why this sort of thing is ok? If this is not ok, then why is it ok that privacy in general is going the way of the dodo?
Comments
More to the point, it's mostly a matter of privacy in "public" versus "private" places. I think secured communication between individuals is not fair game by third parties (though completely fair game if spread/shared by any involved party).
I want cameras on every street in New York. I want that data to be available to any citizen on request. I would be reasonably OK with the full dataset not being generally available, and there being reasonable restrictions on the volume one can request at a given time barring a court order or criminal investigation.
But basically, it comes down to the fact that privacy in public places, or in the presence of/in communication with anyone who cares to share, will cease to be. The final onus will be on individuals to encrypt and protect the conversations and data they wish to keep private, having no recourse of someone with whom they communicate republishes.
I don't trust governments to have a monopoly on surveillance: that scares me far more than surveillance existing in the first place.
Is it the idea that the boundaries between human and technology, between citizen and government could disappear all the more freely should people be equipped this way?
Is it the idea that people could begin to actively morph into agents of the establishment (what's next, Google police scanners)?
Or is it the idea that humans could actively give control away for the sake of comfort?
The internet has already become a symbiote unto itself, but there's still plenty to fear, eh?
I was thinking more about what Rym was saying, and I still super disagree w/ having publicly accessible cameras. But I wonder if you meant moreso than having actual citizen-viewable cameras, you meant access to sort of capital-D Data, like non-person-specific collections of post analyzation information (X number of people who passed the camera wore red shirts, X number of people went into the Apple Store)? That is something I would definitely get behind.
A giant publicly accessible storage of all the statistical information every government agency and company collects about what we do and like and say etc. could do a ton for bolstering overall rationality/intelligence if people are properly motivated to use it (was there a Big Data thread a while back? I feel like there was). This all exists right now, it's just in so many disparate offices/servers/whatevers and is almost always closed off to the public.
I really don't see this info ever being pooled and made public, it's perceived as having immense monetary value by the private sector, and of course will not be distributed freely for that reason. Democracy and rationality are unfortunately utterly impotent in the face of contemporary Capitalism. Though, there are skeptics saying this value is hyper-inflated, and there could be a good amount of money in developing proprietary software or methods for analysis, so I dunno... maybe there's hope?
Ok so anyway, yeah, I guess I do agree it would be really cool + great to have incredible amounts of data accessible to the public, and could completely reshape how we create cognitive models of "the real world" or "what real people do/think." I definitely think anonymity is key when storing and accessing this data, though, so I wonder if, even on a large completely public and global scale, that counts as a reduction of privacy?
Overall, I guess I see the Civilian Smartphone Vs. Government/Corporate monitoring as two completely different things. I am absolutely not cool with a random dude taking a picture or video of me in some situations (like at a party, I get that it happens), cause like I said, I have no idea what his motivation or reasoning is. One good thing IMO is that it's still currently considered rude to do that without asking, and I hope that doesn't change. And I guess I would say I don't see the government or a company collecting information and images about me as particularly problematic or rude, cause (among other factors) I can make a pretty good guess about why they want it, and I don't have TOO much of a problem with their reasons. If Facebook was selling bikini pics to weirdo perverts, then that's problematic to me. If they want to sell knowledge of the amount of times you talked about Coca Cola to a company so they can more accurately advertise to you, then I don't really see how that's impacting your privacy.
The government probably doesn't fucking care about you or your weird fetishes or crazy conspiracy theories or whatever.
A database of statistical information collected by agencies would be awesome.
But of course, that's in the current state of government, where there isn't a huge need to crack down on rights anyway. It certainly gives them an incredibly powerful weapon for whenever they might deem it "necessary" to crack down hard on rights, but I'm not quite so sure it's the tipping point in terms of making the government "too powerful"; especially considering we've all given them trillions of dollars to build an armed force that could squash us in about a million different ways.
I'm not saying that it's a "tipping point." I'm saying that it would be an expansion. They're already too powerful.
That is not ideologically any different than me telling you about a creeper and describing his physical appearance in detail. It's protected free speech.
Egads, did I just invoke Godwin!?
http://www.snopes.com/history/govern/trains.asp
What if you have an app that pulls up a random Google search on any face you see, and the information that pops up on me is "rape victim?" Sure, it's public information, but what right do you have to determine that that is the aspect of my history that becomes immediately identified with me? That that is the face I must put forward?
It's also not slander, because it's entirely subjective. If I think you're a creeper: you are as far as I'm concerned. I'm just sharing my opinion on particular people with my friends for easy reference.
As for lookups, it's already information that's public and out there. While that's a completely separate thing from my app and the issues with it, it's unavoidable. This technology changes nothing except that it makes these lookups easier and automatic.
1. The statement - effectively "I believe this person is creepy" - is true: I DO consider this person to be creepy. Truth is basically an absolute defense against libel and slander charges.
2. "Creepy" is subjective and has no real specific enough definition to warrant that the single word, applied to a single person, is defamation per se. That means the plaintiff would have to prove specific damages.
3. Calling someone "creepy" is almost definitely covered under "fair comments and criticism" precedent, which further shields me.
4. The burden of proof is on the plaintiff, not me. Good luck to anyone proving in court that they are "not a creeper."
5. This statement was not published publicly or widely, but was literally information shared among friends. There would be a high test to bring this into a court as defamation and win.
6. Forums or data sharing services are themselves largely immune to slander and libel here: individual parties making specific claims have to have action brought against them: the app itself is safe.
7. The US takes these protections so seriously that we passed a law basically making it a crime to use other countries' libel/slander laws against US citizens: The SPEECH Act.
US law make defamation cases extremely difficult to win already. Coupled with both "truth" (the statement is my belief or opinion) and subjectivity (it's a vague statement that neither qualifies for per se defamation status nor presents any quantifiable harm), I am 100% justified in sharing this type of statement and would be in no danger of a lawsuit.
If "creeper" bothers you, replace it in all instances above with "that guy."
TL;DR: the burden of proof would be on the plaintiff, not me. The US has the strongest protections on free speech in the world, and defamation is extremely difficult to win in court.
Is there a statute of limitations on the "creeper" tag? What if I do something as an awkward teenager that puts me on the list but eventually grow up and develop actual social skills?
What if I was a rape victim 15 years ago but never did anything much worthy of Google's attention since then?
I see this being a movement toward a society that is practically Victorian in its level of repression, because anything you ever do (or is even done TO you) that is not approved of by society at large becomes a black mark on your record that NEVER EVER GOES AWAY. The internet does not forget. But sometimes people should.
Someone's personal opinion of you is THEIR data, not yours.
Mined public factual data is a separate issue.
Conflating them makes arugmentation difficult.
My app is something I personally want. If a friend of mine flags someone else as a creeper, I would like to avoid them, as I trust my friend's judgement. I'm indifferent to if the flag is "correct" or not: one cannot deeply evaluate every person one ever meets. The flag is a piece of information I would use to decide wither to engage the person in conversation or make an excuse to get the hell out of there.
I ALREADY have creeper tags. Friends already warn eachother about creepy people. This just makes it easier.
So, for the creeper tag, any limitations are entirely, 100% arbitrary to the whims of the app creator and/or its users. My opinion of someone is my data, to do with as I wish. Someone else's opinion of someone, if shared with me, is also my data to do with as I wish.
A web page gives me some text and an image. I can choose whether or not to display either or both. They don't get to tell me otherwise.
If the image is an ad, I can choose to block it, choose to download but not display it, or choose to display but simply ignore it. I might also choose to boycott, for the rest of my life, whatever product is displayed in the images. I may or may not choose to buy the item.
Regardless, I was presented with data, and made a decision based on how I wanted to weigh that data in my other decisions onward. The creeper tag is no different.