[extropy-chat] privacy rights

[Anders Sandberg]

Samantha Atkins wrote:
> On May 13, 2006, at 4:02 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote:
>> [Hi, by the way!]
>
> Hey!  Long time no post.

Yup. Been busy settling in into the transhumanist hotbed of Oxford.

>> 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.
...
>
> If the State has more or less complete awareness of everything
> everyone does then the State is also fully aware of any actions by
> anyone or any group of people that may thwart its desires.

I think you are making the State too much into a person here. States do
not have opinions and desires in the same sense as humans do; trying to
apply such terms leads to conclusions like that the EU is wildly pro *and*
anti-privacy at the same time.

Let's try to apply a more sociological approach: states are composed of
people and groups with various interests, incentives and ideas. They are
not perfectly collaborating or in synch, they are seldom 100% good or evil
and so on. Try to thwart the State and you might often find fierce
resistance from some parts (based by everything from self-interest to a
belief that it is actually for the best), indifference from most parts and
sometimes active support from other parts (again, based on what the issue
is).

> The
> police cannot be trusted to serve us because the serve the State and
> the State is not perfectly in our control and likely never can be.

Maybe that is true in the apparently perfect police state USA, but it is
strangely far from the true in commie centralist Sweden. Very odd. :-)

The State is a dangerous tool that must be kept under tight control (and
most states aren't these days) but one doesn't need total control. Maybe
I'm just a blue-eyed Swede who naively trusts his government, but so far
the evidence has been that when it is found to do nasty or stupid stuff
that the citizens dislike it is actually forced to change direction (too
bad about the nasty stupid stuff most of the citizens like).

>> 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.
...
> I am unsure what you are advocating on the first.  Transparency of
> the state to the people?  The state will never agree to this.

Hmm, is that why freedom of information acts have been banned worldwide?
Look at the EU Public Sector Information Directive - far weaker than the
Swedish version, but still clearly moving in the more transparent
direction. And this isn't one state agreeing to a bit more transparency,
this is 25. Sure, state employees and organisations often dislike this,
sneak around transparency and try to hinder it. But it is clearly
something that is politically possible to implement and get a public
opinion to support.

>  Laws
> can much more easily protect us from actual harm from our fellow
> citizens.  Their mere disapproval is another matter that I doubt we
> need laws against.

Suppose sexual preferences or religion was a matter of public record
(maybe compiled ad hoc using eye saccade measurement or statistical
analysis of net traces). It could be easy for bigots to use an AR wearable
to mark "sinners" to publicly shun (to signal socially to others that
these are bad people) or try to save (i.e. harass). What laws could deal
with this? And without laws, what is a good social counterstrategy to
promote tolerance?

The problem with laws is that the legal system is a slow, blunt and
expensive instrument only suitable for the very extreme, rare or expensive
cases, not the myriad of human-to-human bothers that happen all the time.
That is why they work better IMHO when dealing with aggregates like
companies and institutions than with individual humans unless the latter
do some sufficiently significant crime.

> But it is not everyone's business what I do.  I
> see no reason to make it my neighbor or the state's business.  I also
> don't believe the perhaps implicit assumption that privacy cannot be
> guarded by technology as well as taken away.

Hmm, what would be a good privacy shield?

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

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