81–90 of 226 posts
If you think privacy is the major concern of most people then no offence, but you've had a pretty privileged life. I doubt it's even the major concern of most people in Western countries due to unemployment, poverty, debt etc. let alone developing nations which have the real risk of actual famine and so on.
If you think privacy is the major concern of most people then no offence, but you've had a pretty privileged life. I doubt it's even the major concern of most people in Western countries due to unemployment, poverty, debt etc. let alone developing nations which have the real risk of actual famine and so on.
Are you saying that privacy should be trade for less poverty, less unemployment, less debt, etc? Lot of people do not have the luxury to focus on privacy concerns, the same way lot of people do not have the luxury to care or focus on climate issues. Does that make privacy and climate concerns something reserved for "people with privileged life"? It seems quite clear to me that's not the case. They are both a concern…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fwiw - these two things are not as disentangled as one might think. Consider disinformation leading to the widespread climate change deniers. Both are existential threats with high degrees of uncertainty.
How is disinformation entangled with privacy?
I knew this author's approach was doomed when I read:
> So, to defend privacy we need to accept shared norms of behavior.
At least in the US, this simply doesn't appear to be possible. Look at how our lives have changed (or not) during the COVID pandemic. Look at the recent debate between 2020 POTUS candidates. We don't DO shared norms in the way that would be required to make true/complete/meaningful privacy a reality.
My expectation is that if it's on the Internet, if it's outside, if it's in a crowd... it's public (or can be made public). Everything you express can be observed and used, and that sucks. Does that have a chilling effect? Of course!
Being able to say anything controversial in private is a somewhat worthless freedom in the context of politics. You might get that, in practice (in the past?), in some dictatorships, and still be subject to their arbitrary power. The important thing is the freedom of speech in public. People may not like you and dissociate from you, but your livelihood should not be in danger. No one, such as like your employer, should be able to force you into anything.
The thing missed in many idealistic analyses like that is that the society has to grant you some standard of living and social environment in order for this to work. You have to be economically safe enough to speak relatively freely. People have to look at you and assume good intentions and stress the value of your liberty, even if they don't like what you're saying or doing. It's easy to see that even in the West you can still be deprived of this because of ethnicity or economic situation. This doesn't justify taking away the freedoms that people have, but shows that this isn't and never was a fully solved problem.
I would agree with the author that laser-focusing on government power is deeply mistaken: everyone in society has some degree of power over all the people that they interact with. We have to confront this fact consciously.
Observing Eastern Europe, I've become especially wary of using the concept of freedom of speech for demagoguery (which this piece, to be clear, doesn't do). In countries like Russia and increasingly Poland you can practice various kinds of Western-"problematic" speech with loud applause from the government and its constituency. This is eagerly sold by the ruling group as "freedom", even though offending the ruling religion can land you in arrest. Yeah, I'm now doubly careful if people really mean full freedom for everyone, or just take only the empty word for the purposes of their favorite unfreedom.
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…
Absolutely. Property in law designates rights. Frequently multiple different types of rights are bundled and coexist. This enables the same physical property to be the subject of several and often competing interests e.g. ownership, possession, custody, freehold, leasehold, legal and equitable interests. Having a property right means being able to exclude others from that property to a greater or lesser extent. This may then be modified in different legal contexts but not radically. The statement holds true grosso modo. Online property rights are modelled on traditional property rights without need for more. The discussion of online property is normally about rights of transferring, managing etc. or rights in the manner of acquisition, dealing, disposal etc. Of course this refers to physical assets, but since property is rights and these are created and managed digitally it is online property ipso facto.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is disinformation entangled with privacy?
Targeted disinformation. Imagine being able to compile the cheapest pressure point for everyone in the world using surveillance and then exploiting it on a industrial scale. Most modern surveillance is in a legally ambiguous area of the law. In theory you can target anyone with habitual use of a computer or with friends who use computers a lot for very cheap.
Privacy is dead. Why do we think we have anything close to agency over our self when advertising and — in general — profiteering by trafficking in the private lives of individuals is the force that it is today?
The majority of ways people are giving up privacy right now are optional - it's a consequence of using certain devices and software products. By declaring privacy dead you're only opening the door for things to get worse and for privacy violations to become non-optional - constant tracking devices that you can't take off, your home being monitored by default instead of your having to bring in a device that listens to you, no option to use encryption and so on.
If you think privacy is the major concern of most people then no offence, but you've had a pretty privileged life. I doubt it's even the major concern of most people in Western countries due to unemployment, poverty, debt etc. let alone developing nations which have the real risk of actual famine and so on.
The whole most important is a straw man kinda argument anyway, because it's possibly to have more than one "very important thing", and for the difficult stuff in life you often can't optimize for just one thing.