The second part of your inquiry is about "rights": I am certainly not a believer in God-given rights, as you point out. I'm pretty sure I couched my claims in all the needed ways, that there was an assumption, in our country, that certain types of things benefited society as a whole, etc.
There most common argument for a right of this type, I believe, should be that the benefits are symmetrical between you and I. The benefit you get from respecting my privacy is that I in turn respect yours. To the extent that I can be "the person I want", you get to be "the person you want." This seems to me, as a John Dewey fan now, the inherent experiment of America. What happens when you let people live in a democratic country - not one in which "majority rules", but one in which people are broadly allowed to do their own thing and get the result it produces? The "right to privacy" is a foundational support (I think) for the "right to self-determination". If we have stopped valuing the latter, then we should have an honest conversation about that , instead of trying to kick out the foundation while no one is looking. Since we seem to need a better example... at this point I have no trouble discussing how awkward it was when my mother sent me a "sweet 16" birthday card during my freshman year of college. I wasn't ashamed of being in college at that age, and I certainly wasn't guilty of anything as a result of my age. If anything I was oblivious of it most of the time, and proud of it when I cared to think about it. On the other hand, it made things very awkward when the other students became aware that I was 2-3 years younger than most of them. There was a similar extreme awkwardness to try to avoid when I arrived in graduate school... and at my post-doc... and at my current job. At this point, I am old enough that a few years doesn't make much difference, so I usually will answer when someone asks my age, but I spent many years trying to avoid telling people how old I was. For me, at least, the ability to keep my age private was important for regulating how others treated me. And I think I should have the right to that. (Of course, you will probably point out, my birth record is public... but now we are back to the two different meanings of public vs. private. I'm not sure that it should be public, and at any rate I wasn't worried that a fellow student would fly to San Diego and pull my birth record.) Similarly, my sociologist colleague and I have done some research on atheism in rural Pennsylvania, and I think it speaks to the same point. Most of the participants in our study claim not to be ashamed of their atheism, but they would still rather we don't tell everyone about it. The ways in which they think it would change their social dynamic leads them to keep their lack of faith hidden. For example, they want to avoid the awkward discussions they imagine would happen around the Thanksgiving table every year. The ability, for example, to have an anonymous account they could use in an online atheist chat room, and to know their identity was private, was very important to them. To some extent, I am sure, they would be embarrassed if their non-religious identities were revealed to their families, but that is not their primary motivation for keeping their beliefs private. Hmm... I might be starting to ramble... but I hope my position is at least a little more clear, Eric P.S. By the way, WASP, I can assure you that most of my relatives did not immigrate to this country because they were criminals. (Maybe you are thinking of the early waves of Australian immigrants?) My relatives might ultimately have been choosing to leave or be killed... but politics hadn't gotten quite that bad yet in eastern Europe and western Russia when they shipped themselves over. -------- Eric Charles Assistant Professor of Psychology Penn State, Altoona ----- Original Message ----- From: "Nicholas Thompson" <nickthomp...@earthlink.net> To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group" <friam@redfish.com> Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 12:27:13 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data Dear Eric, I am deeply suspicious of “rights-talk”. “Rights” talk is “obligations-talk” or it is nothing. So whenever somebody claims a right for themselves, they have to state it in terms of obligations on me and on us. What does your right to do obligate ME to not do. If I am to be obligated to NOT do something I might like to do (wire your phone to hear you talking to your stockbroker, or pimp, say) I have to have some benefit. And if society is to go to the extra trouble to enforce your right against my temptation, society as a whole (WETF that is) has to have an incentive. Like most libertarian responses, yours largely leaves those two sides of the discussion. You are believers in Natural Right, which I think makes you believers in God, or incoherent. Lockeans you are not. On the other hand, I admired your whole thing about the Frontier and Second Chances. We are, by immigration, probably a nation of former thieves, cutpurses, embezzlers, for whom the choice was the docks or the stocks. But isn’t that shame? The crime was picking the pocket; the SHAME is having been conficted of having picked a pocket. Why not tell Mrs. Jones as you come in to fix her pipes, “Yes I did 10 years for aggravated burglary and I am proud of it?” There is a very nervous making article in the current new Yorker about a guy who has, in fact, never committed a crime, but who has been in jail for 20 years or so because he seems like the sort of guy who might commit a crime. And what, on the other hand, about all the “second chances” those Priests got. And yes I think we have to consider a new crime. The crime of stalking by using aggregated public data. Nick From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Charles Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 9:40 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data Nick, I have struggled with parts of this quite a bit. As you know, I am a somewhat-crazy Libertarian, and so get stuck in conversations like this on a fairly regular basis. In particular, I reject the idea that privacy is primarily about protecting people from shame or guilt. I believe that privacy (of a certain sort) is a basic right that is essential to a free society. Alas, it is difficult to explain why, as whenever I assert the right to not have certain information public, whomever is on the other side of the argument immediately tries to back me into a corner of being ashamed of whatever it is I want to keep private. There are a few things in my life I am indeed ashamed of, but very few, and I would probably tell most of them to anyone who asked. On the other hand, there are many things that I would like to keep private, and would probably not tell anyone who asked. How to explain the difference? The best I can say, I think, is that I see the right to (mostly) privacy as inextricably linked to the right to (mostly) self-determination. Whether people should have the latter right is certainly up for debate, but I think it has been a cornerstone of US culture through most of US history. At the least, it has been a cornerstone of our social myth structure (for sure if you were a white male, off and on for other groups). The idea that one could get a "fresh start" in America motivated many an immigrant... and part of getting a fresh start was people not knowing everything about you that those you were leaving knew. The mythic Old West was also largely based on such a principle. The ability to control (to some extent) what people know about you is often key to achieving goals (or at least it seems that way). Imagine for example, the otherwise charismatic man with "a face made for radio." He might or might not be ashamed of his looks, but either way he has an interest in keeping his face (mostly) private until his career is sufficiently established. To put it in a more Victorian tone: There are certain things, we need not say which, that I am not ashamed of, and yet it would be inconvenient if they came out. Of those things we shan't speak, and it should be my prerogative to protect them as I see fit against the inquiries of others. ---------- To complicate your inquiry, one of the big legal issues in the fight you see brewing is this: Most of the new slush of public information you are concerned with is put out their voluntarily . The GPS in your phone turns on and off (and if not, you could get a different phone). Your posts, emails, blog entries, online photos, etc. are all being made public intentionally. Those software and website user agreements few ever reads often include consents to use your data in various ways, including making parts public. The old ideas of stalking, I think, mostly involved the accumulation of data against the will of the "victim", and could potentially include the gathering of both private and technically public information (i.e., court records). I don't know how you could make a legal case against someone who only knew things about you that you intentionally threw out into the world for the purpose of people knowing it. If you wander around town everyday without clothes on, it would be hard to accuse someone of being a "peeping Tom" just because they saw you naked. Eric -------- Eric Charles Assistant Professor of Psychology Penn State, Altoona ----- Original Message ----- From: "Nicholas Thompson" < nickthomp...@earthlink.net > To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group" < friam@redfish.com > Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 2:45:52 PM Subject: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data Dear all, We had a discussion last Friday at Friam that I would like to see continued here. Many of us had seen a recent talk in which somebody was using satellite imagery to track an individual through his day. The resolution of such imagery is now down to 20 cm, and that is before processing. We stipulated (not sure it's true in NM) that if I were to follow one of you around for week, never intruding into your private space, but tagging along after you everywhere you went and patiently recording your every public act, that I could eventually be thrown in jail for stalking. We tried to decide what the law should say about assembling public data to create a record of the moment by moment activities of an individual. We suspected that nothing in law would forbid that kind of surveillance, but it made some of us uneasy. So much of what we take to be our private lives, is, after all, just a way of organizing public data. We then wondered what justified any kind of privacy law. If everybody were honest, the cameras would reveal nothing that everybody would not be happy to have known? Were not privacy concerns proof of guilt? No, we concluded: they might be proof of SHAME, but shame and guilt are not the same, and the law, per se , is not in the business of punishing SHAME. I thought our discussion was interesting for its combination of technological sophistication and legal naiveté. (In short, we needed a lawyer) In the end I concluded that, as more and more public data is put on line and more and more sophisticated data mining techniques are deployed, there will come a time when a category of cyber-stalking might have to be identified which involves using public data to track and aggregate in detail the movements of a particular individual. Do we have an opinion on this? We will now be at St. Johns for the foreseeable future. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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