Neil Bothwick schreef: > On Thu, 11 Aug 2005 19:51:36 -0700, Bob Sanders wrote: > > >>Um...you may not know this, but Holly is in the UK. London in >>particular has cameras all over the place. From what I've heard, it's >>not possible to walk in public there without being recorded. In >>public, there is already a trail of her activities. > > > I thought Holly was in Holland, but she can answer that for herself.
Yep, born in the US; New York City, in fact, which is why I tend to go on about one's 'right' to be accurately aware of your environment-- there have been many periods in NYC history where it was critically important to actively observe your 'local environment' in order to be aware (for instance) that a released mental patient was near you on the subway platform (because there was a rash of such people pushing strangers onto the tracks), not to mention the 'Crazy man of 96th Street', who assaulted people with thrown objects when they were walking along the street. I moved to The Netherlands 5 years ago. I've never been to the UK, but from the news, it looks like they're getting almost as 'paranoid' about accurately assessing their environment as the US is since 2001. Which is not a big surprise, both due to the attacks, and due to the fact that everybody is now playing 'catchup' in terms of 'what the hell is actually happening in the area for which I'm responsible'? It often happens that if you let something go for a while, when the time comes around that you finally need to take care of it, you have to do a lot more work than if you had been keeping track of the job's necessities all along. And if you have to do a lot of work, very fast, most people will often go 'overboard'-- do everything possible, because the lack of organization in the job due to the lack of prior attention, and the time constraints make it impossible to distinguish what is strictly necessary to be done to accomplish the job, as opposed to what is possible to do but not strictly necessary. So it's no big surprise that we've gone from 'observing very little' (in an effort to maintain the illusion of privacy), to 'observing everything possible, whether or not it's relevant' (because we have realized that being unaware of your environment is dangerous, but since we haven't been observing up to this point, we have no way to judge exactly what information is relevant to minimizing or eliminating the dangerous conditions). Because we have made significant technological advances, we now have the ability to observe quite a great deal. And we're 'stupid' enough to be happy about that, as if the ability to observe, collect and maintain irrelevant data is not a waste of resources and attention, and as if our ability to 'entertain' the masses with irrelevant observation (Reality TV) is not itself undermining our ability to limit the amount of observation in our personal lives *to* the relevant. Big Brother may be watching you, but you watch Big Brother-- that show with the incredibly ironic name-- don't you? So who are 'you' (generic) to talk about 'privacy'? Much less as a inalienable right, when it's clear that this right can be happily bought and sold? Holly -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
