Complacency

[Paul Sholtz]

I don't agree that you need to curtail free speech rights in order to
guarantee privacy rights.  I hear this argument a lot, but I believe it
stems from confusion between privacy as a social force and privacy as an
economic force.

The fact that you're on camera when you're walking down the street might be
creepy, but the fact is that this is information that has *always* been
available to the public sphere anyway. Now it can just be recorded, indexed
and retrieved more efficiently. It is, however, unclear whether such
monitoring is truly an "unreasonable search and seizure" as per the 4th
amendment. 

> Your argument is prima facie ludicrous --- it can't be a net 
> positive for
> liberty if it restricts legitimate activities, which it is 
> sure to do, esp
> if --- as is only fair --- the civic technology is made 
> available to the
> public.  Consider:  Joe's wife Jane has access to the public 
> monitoring
> system of the local police net.  Joe is seeing Jill on the 
> side;  now this
> may or may not be wrong, but it's certainly not illegal.  
> Simply by virtue
> of Jane having access to intelligently-filtered vid of the 
> downtown area,
> Joe and Jill will have to conduct their rendezvous somewhere else.
> Eventually, where?  Widespread public surveillance will lead 
> to widespread
> sneakiness and paranoia.
> 

Privacy as a social force is kind of an instant karma thing - it's like the
more advanced information technology becomes, the more instant everyone's
karma gets.. In this example, yes Joe and Jill may be required to rendezvous
elsewhere, but the law of female instincts ;) implies that Jane is
eventually going to find out about Jill one way or another. All that the
high technology does is make Joe's karma that much more *instant*, as the
case may be..

But privacy as an economic force is different. One could argue that in the
above case, Joe didn't get anything he didn't already deserve. But when
personal information is exchanged in the course of business transaction,
particularly in a sensitive contexts like finance or health, there is the
risk of serious and deleterious consequences for the data subject when the
information is used in ways inconsistent w/ his expectations at the time the
information was disclosed.

There are several cases on record of banks calling in mortgages on their
clients when they discovered (from an affiliated insurance company or health
care provider) that the person in question was being treated for cancer or
some other terminal ailment. Such action (on the part of the banks) clearly
benefits nobody (economically), and there should be a system in place to
protect against abuses of this nature.

I would argue that when personal data is exchanged in a commercial setting,
it is exchanged under  contract and you can therefore apply property law to
the transaction - property rights over personal data (given to the
individual consumer), as the case may be. This is not, as it were, a threat
to journalists since data given to a journalist is basically never covered
by a written contract (at least, not an explicit one):

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_5/sholtz/index.html

Paul Sholtz
http://www.paulsholtz.com