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:[email protected]] 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 _____ From: "Nicholas Thompson" <[email protected]> To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group" <[email protected]> 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 <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
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