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Privacy is the most important concept of our time

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Re: Privacy is the most important concept of our time

#21

Post by umilegenio »

docdeek wrote: post #8

The author goes too far when they suggest there should be laws (and one imagines punishments for those who break them) that prevent something being shared in one space from being shared elsewhere. For example, if I share something with my family, there should be a law that prevents a family member from making what I said public. Not only would this be a nightmare to police but it would give rise to some anti-social o…

I am the original author. That are good points. I think that punishment would mostly comes through social interactions (i.e., we should chastise people) or technical means (i.e., you are banned from sharing content for X days), but also fines for the most egregious offenders. We fine people all the time.

> If I was flat out telling my family I didn't like race X and wished that religion Y could be outlawed, and then shared in the public realm that racists are terrible and that freedom of religion for all is paramount...shouldn't someone be able to call me out on it? And if not me, imagine a person of some power or influence: don't we want to know when someone's public political stance is different to how they really feel?

You can call out people in private for the bad stuff they share in private. However, you are right it is no so clear cut: we need to find balance. The issue is that making a special exception for powerful and influential people it is dangerous because it is not clear who are. In some way almost anybody has some authority: you might be a parent, the go-to guy for technical things in a community, the administrator of a forum or a open-source project, etc.

Re: Privacy is the most important concept of our time

#22

Post by brongondwana »

docdeek wrote: post #8

The author goes too far when they suggest there should be laws (and one imagines punishments for those who break them) that prevent something being shared in one space from being shared elsewhere. For example, if I share something with my family, there should be a law that prevents a family member from making what I said public. Not only would this be a nightmare to police but it would give rise to some anti-social o…

Interesting choice of example. How about this one - do you like eating meat? What if you were flat out telling your family a story of how you fondly remember a time you had a lovely steak and that you're not 100% onboard with your new vegan party overloards who have declared all talk of meat eating as speciest and abhorent?

Shouldn't it be OK to call you out for your regressive hate speach? He said the N word in private! Nuggets! How very dare. Don't we all have a right to know that secretly he wishes he was still allowed to eat nuggets?

Re: Privacy is the most important concept of our time

#23

Post by MaxBarraclough »

cesarosum wrote: post #11

To the author's opening sentence - I also feel the definition of privacy can be difficult to pin down. I tend to think about privacy as a necessary prerequisite in most contexts to being authentic and truthful - consider what you would say about your employer in a public form versus what you would say to your partner or friend. It gets more complicated in online spaces, particularly when encryption enters. As social…

> the definition of privacy can be difficult to pin down

Indeed, here are two papers on this topic that might be of interest: A Taxonomy of Privacy (Solove, 2005) [0], Conceptualizing Privacy (Solove, 2005) [1].

[0] https://ssrn.com/abstract=667622 , mirrored https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

[1] https://ssrn.com/abstract=313103 , mirrored https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

Re: Privacy is the most important concept of our time

#24

Post by umilegenio »

artonge wrote: post #9

> It was not a time of freedom, but anarchy, where bands of barbarians could roam into your lands and pillage everything. Please, do not use anarchy as a synonym of disorder, violence or war. Pity a blog post about defining a word and an idea starts with a wrong definition of a word and an idea. i.e: Anarchy is about self governance, which theoricaly leads to more freedom than whatever we have now in most country.

Well, as I said the article is my opinion. So, let's agree to disagree.

In my experience real anarchy, in the way you describe, has never been achieved. So, when I hear that it reminds me when people say that real comunism is great, it is just that the URSS was bad, fake communism (it happens here in Italy, not sure if that happens where you are). The only historical anarchy that I know is the one where there is no control. Maybe we can do a better version in the future, but for now that it is what happened.

To be fair, I am Italian, so maybe I am overreacting on the whole barbarians thing.

Re: Privacy is the most important concept of our time

#25

Post by moron4hire »

artonge wrote: post #9

> It was not a time of freedom, but anarchy, where bands of barbarians could roam into your lands and pillage everything. Please, do not use anarchy as a synonym of disorder, violence or war. Pity a blog post about defining a word and an idea starts with a wrong definition of a word and an idea. i.e: Anarchy is about self governance, which theoricaly leads to more freedom than whatever we have now in most country.

> theoricaly

Please, do not use theory as a synonym for hypothesis. Evidence has failed to validate the anarchy hypothesis at scale.

Re: Privacy is the most important concept of our time

#26

Post by GuB-42 »

dfischer wrote: post #4

Privacy and the concept of property blur in the digital. This is interesting when taking the philosophy of natural laws and what a nation like USA is built upon (ideas of natural laws including property, defending life, and so on) Encryption is the only way to have property in the digital universe, however the mechanics of property and cost are also entirely different. Once it exists it’s costless to reproduce in sai…

> However relying on encryption feels a little repugnant as it relies on transferring trust to a mathematical minority that truly understand it.

Physical locks also rely on a minority that truly understand them. A bit less true now that you can find lockpicking tutorials all over the place, but most people just trust their locksmith, who, in turn, trust lock manufacturers.

> And no encryption has ever gone unbroken with time.

Depends on what you are meaning by "broken" and by "time". For example MD5 is broken for collision, but not for preimage, and some algorithms are broken only in theory. As for time, what do you mean? 5 year, 50 years, the age of the universe? And anyways, it is the same for almost every security measure, including physical locks.

> Should there even be a contrived concept of property in the digital universe?

It is an interesting subject because you are probably going to get very different answers if you are talking about DRM or if you are talking about personal data, even though they are both tied to the concept of property. And in every case, it is backed by law. A burglar is not allowed to steal your stuff because your lock is weak, and picking a lock without permission from the owner is illegal. In the same way distributing copies of copyrighted material is illegal without a license, especially if you crack the DRM, and personal data is protected by law (unless you give a license).

Re: Privacy is the most important concept of our time

#27

Post by DarkWiiPlayer »

The problem with privacy as a concept is that it's ultimately just a metaphor. Privacy can exist in the real world, where our perception is limited by physical distance and obstacles.

In the digital world, however, information has different barriers. We like to recreate the mechanics of physical information rules, like separating chats into "rooms", where you be in a room and see the information being exposed there, or not.

But ultimately, these abstractions only serve us in in terms of usability; they don't share the same implications for information control that they have in the real world. Data in a chat room does not exist only within that room: the "room" itself is ultimately just a view into a much more messy underlying digital data structures. Something you say in a digital closed space can be heard, seen and read by somebody who never once stepped foot into the space.

I don't think "privacy" is still a meaningful concept in the online world. The rules of "online privacy" are fundamentally different to those of the physical world and I would prefer using a different word altogether to make this clear.

A few fundamental questions we need to answer before we can have any meaningful discussion on online privact:

- What is information?

- Is there an "atomic" unit of information?

- When is a non-atomic unit of information "true" or "false"?

- When are two units of information equivalent?

- When are two units of information the same?

- In what ways can we act on information?

- In what ways can information flow through a network?

- What legal connections can exist between a unit of information and a legal entity?

Many of these questions also lead into topics such as copyright and intellectual property, which makes sense given that these are ultimately also frameworks to control the spread of information, just with a different motivation.

Those are my thoughts anyway, and I haven't exactly looked any of that up so there might already be a consensus in philosophy on how to answer some, maybe even all, of those questions.

Re: Privacy is the most important concept of our time

#28

Post by umilegenio »

newacct583 wrote: post #12

This seems unpersuasive to me. I mean, privacy is good, sure, I agree with that much. But it's trying to pin too much on one concept. For example, this is a big part of the thesis: > A clear example of the loss of privacy is the rise of violent rethoric. And I think that's pretty clearly disproved by the fact that violent rhetoric is almost always deployed in closed, "private" communities. The more closed, the more v…

It is not really a big part of the thesis, rather an observation.

What you say about private communities is also true. However, I was referring more to the fact that everybody seem to nonchalantly use violent words and dangerous statements to express their disagreement, i.e., people are not just wrong, they are evil bastards that must be removed from public life and the nation itself.

Re: Privacy is the most important concept of our time

#29

Post by mola »

I don't get the conception that the top problem our world have is people being judged about what they said. And that lynch justice is the greatest bane we face.

Don't get me wrong, it's a thing I highly dislike. But it's a thing I worry the least about.

Right now, we have leaders across the globe that put themselves as representing the victims of mob justice and politically correctness.

But these are the people with power, these leaders. A lot of them, bulsano, and trump, make it a point to say whatever the want. Most of the time knowingly lie and cause harrasment to regular people who oppose them. These are the one that have real effective power in the world.

All this cancel culture "violence" is a mere slingshot to the literal nuclear weapons The representatives of their so called victims are holding.

The greatest bane to the world right now is attention theft. It's the news cycle, the constant barrage of irrelevant information. The murder of effective discussion and thought.

Re: Privacy is the most important concept of our time

#30

Post by umilegenio »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #2

It's important but 'most important of our time'?

My argument is that without privacy we cannot build and defend other rights. Privacy allows to define private, social and public spaces with different rules. Without privacy your private stuff can be shared with the public. You could lose your jobs because you said something that your community does not approve. Privay in the modern world is like borders. Without borders we cannot really decide which laws to apply, because anybody could come in and go, so it would become impossible to enforce any kind of law.
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