Complacency

[Jeff Bone]

Paul Sholtz wrote:

> 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.

I've never advocated curtailing free speech, nor have I --- I think --- said
anything about the social / economic variations of the privacy issue.  IMO, the
surveillance issue is a social behavior issue, not --- my previous arguments
about equivalence notwithstanding --- an economic one, under the commom
interpretation of economics.

> 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.

Only to those that care to be in the part of the public sphere you're in, when
you're there.

> 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.

The problem is that such information *currently* is both ephemeral and limited
in scope.  Allowing public surveillance opens the door to such information being
both persistent and much larger in scope;  this is a scary qualitative change,
with significant potential impact on public behavior, both good and bad.

> 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..

Oh, what a great argument --- let's make bad policy decisions on the basis of
the "karma" impact the new policies will have. :-( :-(

> 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.

I wouldn't.

> 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.

I would agree.  But I don't think the right to not be filmed in public rests
necessarily on property law;  half of the privacy issue that's come up of late
requires a new philosophical commitment to privacy as such, not a construction
from existing principles.

jb