Nick -
Shame and Guilt are definitely implicated in the loss of Privacy, but
not the whole story. And the *legal* aspects come *after* the social
and the human aspects of the topic.
Eric -
Privacy is a fundamental *need* of humans. I'm not sure where it comes
from or what other animals share that need, but it is fundamental and
unequivocal for humans, despite many situations where *overt* privacy is
highly compromised.
I think the "voluntary" aspect of much of our information exposure is
somewhat of a red herring. I do not think most people appreciate how
*exposed* their information is. For lots of reasons, we fail to read or
ignore EULAs and Service Use Agreements all the time. We don't always
appreciate the unexpected ways disparate information about us can be
fused to infer new information.
In some ways, saying that we *voluntarily* put our information into the
public sphere is a lot like the arguments that women who do not remain
fully scarfed in public are inciting sexual violence against them.
Public figures, especially attractive young female entertainers, *know*
that Paparazzi with very long lenses are stalking them all of the time.
Whether they have anything to be ashamed of or feel guilty about is
moot, their nature as public figures in the sightline of public places
makes them fair game for such invasions of privacy. It is equally
inevitable and unhealthy for stalked and stalker alike IMO.
All -
I think the term *stalking* also carries a connotation of engagement. A
stalker who never reveals themselves, nor acts overtly on the knowledge
they gained as a stalker is something else... perhaps a voyeur?
I was once a private investigator and my job was, at it's core, to bend
the boundaries of people's privacy if not to invade it directly. I was
careful about how far I took it and thoughtful about what I did with
what I learned.
I left the profession for many reasons but one issue was that the
private things I knew about many people weighed heavily on me. I took
at most passing prurient interest in some of these things, and mostly
curbed myself from abusing my unwholesome knowledge of others' lives
(mostly in the context of conflict of interest when I learned things
about my clients or took on clients who I already knew too much about).
By the time I left it, I did not respect the profession, even in it's
idealized image.
As my wife's tech support, I have access to all of her e-mail and web
history. I even set her up with Skype and turned on auto-answer so that
she could check in on the dog at home from her smart phone (when she
understood the implications of this, she made me turn it off). It is
understood between us that I do not abuse the privileges my superior
technical position gives me. She also has 30 years of journals shelved
within 20 feet of me which I could pull down and read at the drop of the
hat. It is important to her well-being that she feel secure in her
privacy and it is important to my own emotional health that I not
transgress, even if she "would never know". I'm pretty sure she does
not riffle my wallet or backpack or check my phone history, for
precisely the same reasons.
I contend that there is as much damage to the invader of privacy as
there is to the invaded. Who do we become when we do not respect the
boundaries of others? Who are we as a society when we allow or
encourage others to transgress? I understand the arguments for Law
Enforcement and Intelligence and Security *wanting* to spy on people
freely... to restrict the use of cryptography, etc. but they don't
outweigh the risk of who we become when we do these things.
Unfortunately they really don't ask my opinion, much less permission in
such matters. Subsequently I have a lot of mistrust for those apparati.
- Steve
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" <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://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
http://www.cusf.org <http://www.cusf.org/>
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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