Raymond,
I guess I am a behaviorist about shame. If my behavior makes me blush than it was shameful. Guilt, on the other hand is something the law determines. Just my way of talking, I guess. But why do petty lies grease the wheels of society. What lies behind that confident assertion? Nick From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Parks, Raymond Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 1:03 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data Social structures work because we don't have to always be completely truthful. "White lies" grease the gears of society. Bruce points out that Japanese society engages in the illusion of privacy - western societies do that, also. I'm not talking only about "That outfit doesn't make you look fat". I'm also talking about simple things like shopping at a store that competes with your friend's store or seeing a doctor not your primary care provider for a second opinion. Some folks can do these things boldly and without caring about hurting someone's feelings. Most folks prefer discretion and no hurt feelings. If your PCP or store-owner friend can easily find out that you've been straying, their feelings will be hurt doubly - because you didn't trust them or preferred a better price and because you did it "behind their back". There's no shame or guilt to what you've done - but society runs smoother if there are no hurt feelings, also. Ray Parks Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager V: 505-844-4024 M: 505-238-9359 P: 505-951-6084 NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder) JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder) On Jan 15, 2013, at 9:40 PM, Eric Charles wrote: 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://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 ============================================================ 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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