It's not so much that it's framed as an individual right, surely, so much as it's framed/interpreted as a right against government. This is not the case in Europe -- see GDPR, "right to be forgotten" et al.
Until recently, ambient privacy was a simple fact of life.As we've discussed before, this isn't really true; only the largest cities had any privacy or anonymity, almost everyone else was living in a small and static community. Today may in fact be the first time ever most humans are living in substantially anonymous environments.
My own suspicion is that ambient privacy plays an important role in civic life.I think this is definitely true, but only in the liberal sense of civic that we know, involving freedom of opinion & C; other societies have civic life aplenty, but it isn't liberal - everyone knows everyone and everyone is in a hierarchy. My own suspicion, following the line, is that the record urbanization and record democratization of the 20th century are not unrelated.
only the largest cities had any privacy or anonymity, almost everyone else was living in a small and static community.
This is unnecessarily strict. In a small town, you were on display to a few thousand people, with human-length memories. In a big city, you are still on display, maybe to the 100 people who know you in your environments. Either way, now you are on display to megacorporations with infinite memories. It's a substantial difference.
3: Comity. My point is that Ceglowski is being ahistorical: freedom is not the historical human norm; people like us are, to this point, an aberration. In that perspective, current developments look different: to my mind, a lot more consequential, and a lot scarier.
In a small town, there were very certainly people willing to make sure children who weren't yet born knew exactly what kind of an asshole you were when younger. Trust me on that
Back in the olden days, you could just get up and leave and start anew, and odds are your past would never catch up with you, unless of course you were in a Thomas Hardy novel.
Maybe that's the big answer to why the murder rate is so low by historical standards.
Back in the olden days, you could just get up and leave and start anew, and odds are your past would never catch up with you
Or your granddaughter asks CharleyCarp to discover your secret identity.
I think there's also a very necessary counterpoint to all this, which is surveillance as a social good. Those hierarchies in 2 weren't just gratuitous, they also performed necessary functions; policing by consent, the kind I assume we all like, depends on citizens surveilling one another and calling the police as needed.
There are any number of developing countries with high rates of crime, or simply disorder (imbricated with the same mass urbanization in 2), where well-implemented panopticons would be a godsend. In the past we talked briefly about the role of violent crime in producing Bolsonaro; AIHMHMMMMMTB, research shows people become more authoritarian the more afraid they are.
Currently, the PRC is supplying surveillance technology to those countries, indifferent at best to the uses it is put. Western firms and governments should be supplying that need, tied to rule-of-law and human rights requirements, with whatever subsidies needed to make those strings acceptable to the customers.
Cegłowski mentions two varieties of panopticon: the American, tailored for ad-serving, and the Chinese, tailored for autocracy. I think any future we want to live in needs a third, tailored to rule of law and civil liberties.
6: This reminds me of an Agatha Christie novel I read recently. Miss Marple explains that in the old days, when someone new moved into a village, they came with letters of introduction from someone known. They would have served in the same regiment or on the same ship or been to the same school with a person from the village or one of their close relatives. She then observes that nowadays "just anybody" can move in.
9.2 This is very idealistic. Western governments, or rather, Western based corporations are supplying these kinds of surveillance technologies to various third world countries. Hell, a lot of former NSA and similar types are working almost directly for these countries like KSA, the UAE, etc. This is not a good development. And surveillance does little to nothing to deter crime but has always been used to suppress dissent.
I think any future we want to live in needs a third, tailored to rule of law and civil liberties.
Does it make me a libertarian that I see this as inevitably turning into an autocracy?
Cegłowski mentions two varieties of panopticon: the American, tailored for ad-serving, and the Chinese, tailored for autocracy. I think any future we want to live in needs a third, tailored to rule of law and civil liberties.
Has anyone here read David Brin's The Transparent Society? It's been on my "slightly curious" list for a long time, and it's now 20 years old, but the description still feels relevant.
Brin thus maintains that privacy is a "contingent right," one that grows out of the more primary rights, e.g. to know and to speak. He admits that such a mostly-open world will seem more irksome and demanding; people will be expected to keep negotiating the tradeoffs between knowing and privacy. It will be tempting to pass laws that restrict the power of surveillance to authorities, entrusting them to protect our privacy--or a comforting illusion of privacy. By contrast, a transparent society destroys that illusion by offering everyone access to the vast majority of information out there.
Brin argues that it will be good for society if the powers of surveillance are shared with the citizenry, allowing "sousveillance" or "viewing from below," enabling the public to watch the watchers. According to Brin, this only continues the same trend promoted by Adam Smith, John Locke, the US Constitutionalists and the western enlightenment, who held that any elite (whether commercial, governmental, or aristocratic) should experience constraints upon its power. And there is no power-equalizer greater than knowledge.
I wonder if in the long run the only feasible options to choose between will be (a) unbounded surveillance society exploited by autocrats and monopolists and (b) surveillance society with strict and just governance on access and use of surveillance data.
However, I like that we are moving a bit toward a preventative principle, with SF and Oakland moving to ban face recognition outright, after years of law enforcement insisting it could attach reasonable safeguards and never following through in any credible way.
For medical and genetic information, I think that much (not all) of the importance of privacy comes from the fear that employers and health insurance companies will use the information against you. To me that is a much more concrete fear than google and facebook doing something with their knowledge of my online behavior. I'm not sure how to generalize from this; maybe that it helps to articulate the harms? Back to medical privacy, I imagine that if the government of California had a universal health care system, then I would trust them with my medical information.
11: Yes. It needs to be a conscious and heavily regulated state endeavor. Leave it to mercenaries and things will continue as you say. Of course I think there's essentially zero chance of this happening.
And surveillance does little to nothing to deter crime but has always been used to suppress dissent.
Cite? From third-world countries with both high crime rates and mass surveillance? Anecdote: police community liaison officer said almost every case they solved was solved through either license plate numbers or cellphone tracking.* Panopticon gives you both whenever you need.
12: Inevitable is a strong word, but I essentially agree with you there. Rich, stable, egalitarian country with well-established rule of law and quite strong civic consensus doesn't need surveillance; already-existing countries like that demonstrate as much. Most countries though aren't like that and will take a long time and a lot of luck to get there, and there's no guarantee they'll be liberal when they do; I think the policy in 9 could make it more likely they will be, and leaving the field to the PRC (and mercenaries) will certainly do the opposite. I'd hope that surveillance could be wound down once a country has stabilized and developed. Optimistic I know, but certainly not impossible.
*He was asking the public to help with surveillance, essentially.
I wonder if there have been any studies comparing speed of rollout of mass surveillance in the UK with crime rates.
8 And that was before DNA testing had gotten onto my radar. Human length memory has always been imperfect as a limit, because, after the invention of writing, no one could control what someone else wrote about them.
AMHMB that my mom's great grandmother had a kid brother (youngest of 12) who left the farm in Iowa in the late 1870s and went off to sea. Got a gal in Australia pregnant, married her, then ditch wife and kid to return to the US. Wife claimed to be a widow and remarried. Kid brother married a gal in Iowa, had some kids, and ended up abandoning that family as well. The Iowa family didn't know about the Australian family, and vice versa. An Australian contemporary of mine and I figured this all out maybe 15 years ago, using publicly available documents; I've since gotten copies of letters the Australian wife wrote to several people in the US seeking information about the husband she knew wasn't dead.
Now, with DNA, people are going to be able to spot a ton of this kind of thing.
Anyway, privacy at a certain level has always been something of a delusion. You might be able to hide in real time -- I'm sure the kid brother was never held to account for the Australian family -- but we leave a lot of different kinds of footprints.
Sooner or later, however, vendor support for .footprint will cease.
There's a rash of journalism at the moment about all the family upheavals being caused by cheap DNA testing, but one new-to-me scenario I just saw on Reddit was someone discovering that they had been custodially-kidnapped and taken out of state as a toddler, their rightful mother was someone unknown to them, and the kidnapper-parents both had warrants in the original state for 20 years.
Imagine having it come public that you stole a baby or had relatives living in Iowa.
20 Isn't that nearly all the milk carton kids?
I recently heard a rumor that my great-grandfather's first cousin's wife's 3 sons all had different fathers (only one the son of the first cousin's). The other two fathers were supposedly (i) a Scandinavian polar explorer and (ii) a descendant of Sitting Bull. A grandson of the woman was telling me that among his cousins, also grandchildren of the woman, the predominant sentiment towards DNA testing was 'fuck no!' while their children were all 'cool, let's find out.'
18: yeah, there's something like that in my family tree, but I haven't been able to figure out what happened. My great-great-grandmother whom we'll call Jenny married, had three kids, separated from husband, remarried (in the Catholic Church!), and a few years later was listed in all documents as the widow of this second husband, whose name she kept for the rest of her life. Three possibilities: 1) septuagenarian guy in Chihuahua, still married to the mother of his six or seven children, died in Mexico a year after Jenny's wedding, survived by his longtime wife; 2) his son with the same name, slightly younger than Jenny, who married some years later in Mexico and whom the marriage record called a bachelor; 3) unattested mystery third guy with the same name. I guess 2) is the most likely, with the widowhood being a fiction, but wow. It's just barely possible that the diocese of San Antonio has the answer somewhere, or has suppressed it, since following the thread would unravel centuries of deceit and double-dealing.
lk, I can imagine DNA adding some datapoints to that.
I can't pull the trigger on DNA testing. I'm curious, and am grateful that my aunt shared her data with me, but I can't quite bring myself to do it, I guess for ill-defined privacy-related reasons.
25: nah, they didn't have any kids, to my knowledge. It's totally inconsequential; I'm just curious.
That said, I am unaware of consumer DNA testing actually being abused for surveillance purposes -- am I forgetting any high-profile stories about this where there was a serious adverse outcome, as opposed to catching the Golden State Killer and so on? Of course it seems "inevitable" that it's going to go awry, but so far... no?
That said, I am unaware of consumer DNA testing actually being abused for surveillance purposes . . . Of course it seems "inevitable" that it's going to go awry, but so far... no?
After a quick search I found this which makes it sound like there's a law:
In 2008, Congress passed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act to prevent employers and insurance companies from discriminating against Americans based on their medical records.
But that might change
On March 8, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce narrowly approved HR 1313, which could allow employers to require genetic testing as part of a workplace wellness program. Employees could face financial penalties if they refused.
My sister got DNA tested, so I figure the cat is out of the bag for me on whatever would be worth trying to hide.
On March 8, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce narrowly approved HR 1313, which could allow employers to require genetic testing as part of a workplace wellness program. Employees could face financial penalties if they refused.
Its nice to know that lawmakers in both parties can still reach around the aisle on behalf of the insurance industry. Nancy is right that this kind of bold, bipartisan reform would not be possible if everyone was distracted by impeachment.
31.last. I'd think just the opposite. Slip it into law while everyone distracted by the circus.
Nancy is right that this kind of bold, bipartisan reform would not be possible if everyone was distracted by impeachment.
Sorry, I should have specified that the article was from 2017. That doesn't change your primary point, but it wasn't the current Congress involved. I don't think the bill has passed, it looks like it was never voted on by the full house.
The Full House lady is going to prison.
From the Full House to the Big House.
Alan Smithee presents Lori Loughlin & John Stamos in "Caged Heat 2."
I think you forgot to embed the tweet.
I was maintaining the sanctity of off-blog communication. See here.
Oh that kind of winning Twitter. You realize we were expecting the greatest joke of all time, I hope.
So, that guy I mentioned who came from Pittsburgh to Brooklyn to (allegedly) burn down the house of his former rabbi? Somebody found that last year he was on Nextdoor in my neighborhood seeking clients for his in-home daycare (newborn through school age).
"Kill Rabbi Max? No, not at all! That's just German for 'The Rabbi Max, The.'"
Also, apparently almost a war with Iran and a credible accusation of rape against the president. We're a banana republic without the bananas (unless you count grocery stores).
But at least the elected officials of the Republican Party care enough about women and children to remind the police to only send unmarried male officers, because they are promising to kill the police.
Anyway, living a sane life now requires ignoring repeated, blustery threats of violence from the people who spent the last twenty years writing books about the importance of culture.
54: Given what cultures they idealize, totally consistent. Yes, ones with deeply ritualized and formal class structures. But also ones with explicit violence and implicit threats thereof.
An armed society is a polite society and all that. That's always tickled me: be nice to me or I'll fucking murder you--ain't I polite?
Then I feel that they should leave Jesus out of it.
Oh, absolutely. It's a rare Republican belief that you can find support for in what Jesus said, usually the opposite. Christianity has always been a facade, and honestly I feel like they'd be more comfortable with some of the more bellicose Roman gods. That alternate reality would probably be worse, but it'd be less hypocritical.
52. It's all right, domesticated bananas will be extinct in a few years and you can rename the republics after something more inclusive, avocados maybe.
57 As I've often said, I've only met 3 or 4 Christians in my entire life.
That Independence Day reference in 58 is almost as sad and strange as the story itself.
Will Uganda get rich commodifying its natural wealth of banana diversity? Probably not, but I hope so!
I think there's also a very necessary counterpoint to all this, which is surveillance as a social good. Those hierarchies in 2 weren't just gratuitous, they also performed necessary functions; policing by consent, the kind I assume we all like, depends on citizens surveilling one another and calling the police as needed.
And, key point, that didn't work very well, because these societies had rates of violent crime far higher than anything any of us have ever experienced.
3: why should I be concerned about the duration of memory? I mean, I'm only going to be around for a single human lifespan, so the idea that Facebook will still have my records in 2350 (and we are assuming here that Facebook etc _do_ have infinite memories which is highly questionable) shouldn't really concern me.
Obligatory Holmes quote:
The sun was shining very brightly, and yet there was an exhilarating nip in the air, which set an edge to a man's energy. All over the countryside, away to the rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and grey roofs of the farm-steadings peeped out from amid the light green of the new foliage.
"Are they not fresh and beautiful?" I cried with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.
But Holmes shook his head gravely.
"Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there."
"Good heavens!" I cried. "Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?"
"They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside."
"You horrify me!"
"But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard's blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser..."
Also, the amount of drunk driving would have astounded him.
Thread unexpectedly topical because the big political issue over here is whether you should call the police when you hear screams coming from the flat where the next prime minister lives with his mistress.
NOt sure this is entirely accurate: the question is whether you should inform the Guardian that you have done so after the police have gone away without arresting or even roughing up a little the next Prime Minister and hand them a tape of the row as heard from the next flat.
The answer, obviously, is "yes -- and why didn't you manage to get another tape of him asking the cops if they knew who he was?"
That's just got to be awkward for the police officers involved.
Given that the police initially denied the incident had ever happened, and were heard asking for the report to be "restricted", I think it's pretty obvious they knew exactly who he was.
Presumably whoever dispatches 999 calls will flag up certain addresses for special treatment, for precisely this type of situation, even if individual cops might be clueless. (At least in posh areas like... searching... Camberwell?? That seems inapposite from the time I was there but what do I know, maybe it was Symonds's flat first.)
The overlooked factor is how hard it is to clean red wine out of the sofa.
That's why we have a wooden bench.