[extropy-chat] privacy rights

[Anders Sandberg]

[Hi, by the way!]

I'm going to do a lecture on RFID tags in Sweden May 23, debating with the
Swedish privacy right debater Pär Ström
(http://www.atomerochbitar.se/english/), so this discussion is gefundenes
fressen.

Pär is pretty much against electronic traces and allowing big brother all
his powers. I think unfortunately he has a bit simplistic views on how
technology and law work. His position is very much to promote laws
protecting privacy and making it more or less mandatory for new tech to
avoid leaving personal information traces for others to find and exploit.
Even if such laws were enacted on the grand scale (witness the ambitious
EU database protection acts) they can often be circumvented when
convenient (US demands personal info on air passengers, the EU complies;
the police want more information to Protect The Children, everybody
scrambles to give them it). But more importantly, much of the best
technology development is in the informal creative zone. This is where Web
2.0 stuff is made, and it often is based on peoples electronic traces.
Regulations for software privacy are unlikely to stop me from making a new
program ignoring them that I distribute to my friends, who in turn spread
it further and allow it to become another Napster, Flickr or Wiki.
Effective enforcement of privacy would stop this creativity.

So, what can we do? First, giving lots of power to the police isn't a
problem if we can trust the police to serve us. Hence each new power
should be coupled with an increase in citizen control over the agency.
Accountability and transparency in exchange for more power. This is not an
impossible political goal, although at present it is rare and implementing
it will always be uphill.

To get the maximum creativity and innovativenes, we should encourage
tinkering and playing with new technology. Low thresholds to entrance, no
limitations on who gets to connect what to what. This is my main message
to the RFID business, which is still caught in thinking about supply
chains (because that is where the big money is right now) and considering
consumer products to be smart kitchens, washing machines and other
top-down designed systems *for* the consumer. Not that the consumer might
want to use RFID tags on her own in her own ways - to mark up toys, enable
objects to act as remote controls or just for fun. This kind of home
experimentation is both likely to eventually lead to the true killer apps
of RFID - whatever they are - and consumer acceptance.

Most of the privacy abuses we worry about come from two directions.
Concentrations of power like corporations and state, and people in our
close social network. We can use laws and politics against the first,
enforcing transparency, accountability and maybe paying back externalities
of privacy loss. The second group is much trickier, because no law can
protect you from the scorn of your sister or a disapproving mother. And I
think most of the privacy debate has been so obsessed with one's favorite
power concentration that we have missed the very real chilling effects of
creating a transparent village.



-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University