Interesting. As I said originally, we stipulated in our original discussion here in Santa Fe that stalking was illegal. Actually, I don’t know that for a fact. I tried to ensnare a lawyer in our discussions, but he didn’t take the bait. Damn! But continuing to speculate, I assume, if there are such laws they criminalize behavior that is otherwise scrupulously legal. That is, if I follow you around in all you public comings and goings, lurk in the shadows across the street from your house at night, read your garbage, join clubs that you join so I can sit next to you on the next rowing machine, drink at the next table at the bar that you frequent, etc., etc., that eventually I will get a tap on the shoulder from a good constable.
I take it that neither you nor Marcus would think that that tap on the shoulder was justified? If so, then we have no interesting agreement about cyberstalking, because we already disagree about stalking. It’s a metaphor. If we disagree about the source phenomenon, we are obviously going to disagree about the metaphoric one. Nick From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Charles Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 7:18 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data Breaking the reply into two parts... first, about the crime: The notion of public and private has certainly changed over the years. In this context, I think, "public" includes many things that people could find out, but that is not there for people to find out. For example, a public court record exists because someone wanted to takes someone else to court, and a record resulted, which happens to be public. I think however, this distinction probably originated around the ideas of "public lands." Public lands were there for the purpose of being used by people in general, e.g., to graze their sheep and cattle. If people were not using the public land, we would think something wrong. Similarly, we now have public parks that (at least in theory) are there for anyone to enjoy, and we want people to enjoy them. When we see a public park that has not been used in some time, it strikes us that something is wrong. In contrast, we now often think it a Good Thing if people do not use our "public information." This creates an awkward situation for a prosecutor. The public/private distinction was originally about what "we" wanted people in general to use vs. what we wanted to exclude them from using. And now you try to say it is a crime for someone to use public information? What is PUBLIC information for, if not for people in general to use it how they see fit... as it was with PUBLIC land. Unless you can show how I infringe upon another by my use of the public resource, I'm not sure how you will differentiate the criminal from the honest user. And if you can show that I infringe upon another, then prosecute the infringement itself. This is now complicated by the increasing availability of information about you that is not public in the legal sense of "there is a law making this public", but in the broader sense of "you did that in public and people now know." I think we are back to the point where I tell you that you can't really complain about people seeing you naked, if you walk around town without clothes all day. If someone is following you on twitter, and reading your Facebook posts, and your live journal entries, and tracking your cell phone using GPS (which you told your phone to let people do), etc., etc., etc., then they are just observing things you are doing in public. I am, again, quite unsure how the law would distinguish between someone doing that as a stalker and someone doing that as your friend. How do you differentiate criminal use from an honest user, unless you have some other crime they are perpetrating with the information? 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: 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 _____ 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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