Vancouver Airport blocking ads with information on travellers’ privacy rights
globalnews.ca
globalnews.ca
"Know your digital rights at the border" is great. It's in the classic tone of raise-awareness campaigns, does not use fearmongering, and can be safely ignored by anyone who already understands them.
"Your phone isn't safe at the border" is not great. It makes you feel afraid, mis-describes the issue (what about laptops?), and doesn't specify the vested interest (it's about rights).
Both parties deserve censure for their choices.
Once people get used to that what's next? Since we have your phone open, just go and pop your Gmail credentials in there for us why don't you? Your phone was in your pocket so what else do you have in there? Keys, what do they open? etc...
It's a slippery slope and the reason we have checks and balances.
Also, just my phone? What about my laptop? Safe from searches? Pickpockets? Malware?
There's a big difference between raising awareness of issues(ex know your rights - check out xyz.com for more info) vs big brother is, watching; trust no one, followed by a border security queue
If slogans had to be that comprehensive to be allowed, we would be blessedly free of advertising.
"Your phone isn't safe at the border" is on pretty much the same level as "for everything else there's mastercard" on the accuracy<->drama scale. I think your standards are beyond unreasonable here.
It's a sad but true reality.
I'm sick of hearing this argument. Either it's a small percentage of travellers or it's necessary to combat those crimes, but you cannot have both. The only way to have both of those is if you already have some probable cause or a reason to search particular individuals, in which case there's no need for it to be warrantless.
I am disappointed they blocked the ads, but the Streisand effect is in full force here.
"Your phone isn't safe at the border" is FUD.
"Your phone is subject to searches without warrant at the border" is accurate and concrete
I wonder if there is space in this world for non-manipulative political activism and advertising.
What should cause every single person passing through that airport stress is the idea that their fundamental assumptions about personal security are incorrect.
If the ads said "You can be legally compelled to X, even if Y. Learn more about your airport rights at www.url.com" then it would be much less objectionable IMO.
I don't get why campaigns keep making this mistake. Take the freaking high road. Imagine the mind of your opposition, and accomodate the low-hanging complaints they're going to have. Craft a message that's maximally agreeable to the people who disagree, while maintaining accuracy.
Weasels on both sides here, IMO.
At many non-profits, the audiences for messaging are existing donors and fellow executives. There are no measurable objectives from the broader audience. Accountability is thus impossible.
It's 'less objectionable' because it's bordering on bootlicking, and could even read as a tacit endorsement of the status quo.
Thank you - this is a very apt description of how I feel about them as well (also as someone who otherwise agrees with their efforts)
Because it works. And because many other campaigns do it and nobody cares. Then in one random occasion suddenly it's a big drama. Who could have known before? Marketing agencies have been inventing divisive ad statements for ages.
This kind of thing is problematic when someone has a monopoly, which governments and major airports do by default. It might be reasonable under some conditions to have criteria for rejecting ads that are too political, controversial, unfair to the airlines, etc... but those criteria should be published.
I now have undue stress because of you Brock Penner and your stakeholders.
Who are these two groups? Your customers and an oppressive regime?
…telling people about their rights is non-political.
> “Additionally, YVR aims to be non-political and Open Media’s borderprivacy.ca website promotes an online petition with a political call-to-action directed towards government officials.”
> Additionally, YVR aims to be non-political and Open Media’s borderprivacy.ca website promotes an online petition with a political call-to-action directed towards government officials.
Not that I agree with YVRs decision not to allow the ad, but I find it hard to argue that a website including a petition and urging visitors to message the government about the issue to be "non-political."
There is a legitimate argument to be made that policy advocacy is a different kind of "political" than what people generally take that term to mean.
EDIT: That said, I agree with the many other comments here that the tone of the ad in question was confrontational, counter-productive, and fear-mongering. They could perfectly well have made their — again, technically correct — point with a more constructive or informative tone.
That's literally what the ad in question is accused of doing. The link leads to a petition to ask the government for _more_ rights in regards to protection of privacy at the border.
But a civil liberties group informing citizens of their rights in an attention catching way is deplored as intrusive and inappropriate and not “objective” enough.
This attitude speaks volumes about a society that has lost its way and is slowly collapsing under the irreconcilable contradictions it refuses to honestly address.
>“In reviewing Open Media’s request to place advertising at the airport, we determined that it did not serve all of our stakeholders as we felt it pitted two groups against each other and it also has potential to add undue stress to the travel experience,” wrote spokesperson Brock Penner.
>“Additionally, YVR aims to be non-political and Open Media’s borderprivacy.ca website promotes an online petition with a political call-to-action directed towards government officials.”
(It should go without saying that I am not endorsing this statement.)
EDIT: Otherwise, please explain to me how compelled speech is "less bad" than its restraint.
And it gets blurry when the private parties are ISPs or phone companies.
Edit: Alright, taking the hypothetical that the solution is compelled speech, I'll try to explain how it's less bad. First is that there's a distinction between original speech and conveying the speech of others. E.g. it would be pretty awful if ISPs or phone companies started interfering with what they'll transfer through their networks. I frankly disagree with calling what a telecommunications provider does 'speech' - they're paid to move bits, like a moving service is paid to move furniture. And second, if you don't look at it through such an abstract "free speech vs. compelled speech" lens, but through a pragmatic "who can speak and what can they say" one, you'll see that almost no-one has effective free speech. Online, almost all of the audience is on (a small handful of) private platforms, carried by private ISPs, hosted on private servers. Offline, people spend much of their time in privately-owned spaces, such as airports. If you cut all those away, how much speech does the great 1st Amendment buy you? You can yell on a street corner (not Wall street though - those streets are private!), or in the woods, and send a few paper letters through the government-ran post office. You'll reach maybe a handful of people. Meanwhile speech blessed by the platform owners will reach millions. Difference from complete censorship is negligible. That's why you shouldn't legislate in a vacuum divorced from reality, where only platonic ideals of free or compelled speech exist. You'll choose an ideal free speech law, and the effect will be that a handful of corporations will get to decide what can be said.
Not really. That's pretty much exactly what the changes to the verbiage in Title II of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and the FCC's 2015 classification of ISPs as Common Carriers were for.
The First Amendment doesn't guarantee you an audience. It only guarantees you that the State can't constrain your speech without a damned good reason. It is utterly orthogonal to conduct between private parties, and it's specious as hell to bring it up in that context.
For example, even in the case where it effectively limits your ability to sue people for speech you don't like, the actual constraint is on the ability of the State, in the form of the court system, to be leveraged against an individual's speech, not on your ability to sue.
There is absolutely a legitimate, and very, very important conversation to be had around whether, e.g., online censorship or moderation or "deplatforming", or whatever, might constitute something functionally akin to prior restraint, where the edge cases are in those questions, and what to do about all that.
That said, having those discussions about private behavior using terms that are — and historically have more or less always been — used in the specific context of the State only confuses things.
My point being: if we're going to have that discussion, which we for reals should be doing, let's try to do it in a way that doesn't make it harder to have, let alone have productively.
The attempt to expand the specifically and narrowly constrained notion of "Free Speech" (note the capitalization) to domains other than a constraint upon the State is a specious conflation, and ultimately yields more heat than light.
EDIT: I mean, really, how productively can that conversation be had if it's using terminology that enables randos who don't meaningfully understand this distinction to pile on, all, "But the Twitters violated my 1st Amendmentses!"?
If you want to have a discussion about how shit should be done, I'm happy to; I'd just have appreciated being told that's the one we were having before being called out or dinged for wrongthink, thanks...
Compelled speech is (rightly) illegal in pretty much all cases, and while "both or neither" is not quite the same as directly compelling a specific statement, it's still not a free-speech-respecting stance. The thorny question is how to handle public speech conducted through private platforms - for instance the suit over whether President Trump can block people on Twitter. Twitter is obviously a private platform, but it's being used by a public figure to make policy announcements, and blocking restricts the ability of certain people to see and respond to those announcements.
"Public forum" doctrine is controversial, but it's far from new. More broadly, it's the First Amendment application of a larger question: how far can the government go in using private intermediaries to bypass constitutional protections? On the Fourth, police are allowed to use private tips with origins that would be "unreasonable search", but can't proactively request or pay for such searches. On the Fifth, a non-government party might prompt admissible hearsay by means not available to the police, but that doesn't free the police to hand off interrogations to private parties.
That sort of constitutionality-laundering is an increasingly pressing issue, everywhere from warrantless lookups of mobile phone locations to public speech conducted on Twitter. And this is quite clearly the claim laid out in the article (though it's not a US case): that airports are so closely linked to the government that their ability to control speech (especially speech related to government behavior in airports) is restricted. It's a matter open to dispute, but it's very much not as simple as compelling speech from a private party.
If he's using the platform to conduct "official" business (which, IMO, he is), blocking is pretty obviously not kosher. That's an utterly different case than whether they should have to promulgate Joe Bigot's shitty opinions. We already have structurally similar legal doctrines in place in the case of libel against public figures, for example.
Looking for blanket solutions is the wrong idea, out the gate, however much more difficult and nuanced that will ultimately make handling the thorniness of the issue, taken large, and I think you actually already appreciate that, with your takes on the 4th and 5th Amendment questions.
Twitter is very much not obligated to pass along any random person's terrible views (and thanks for the disclaimer; no interest in seeing that argument again). If Trump decides to conduct official business there, they aren't quite facing compelled speech because they can (in theory) ban him; the outcome we'd hopefully get is that his official speech is restricted, but Twitter is free to host him or not.
I suppose at this point the only question is whether a government-proxy rationale applies to airports in this specific case, since I definitely agree that Kayak or Travelocity couldn't be required to accept these ads on their site.
Just so much wrong in this quote, three questions for Brock:
Which stakeholders aren't being served?
What two groups are being pitted against each other?
Is stress that results from knowing the extent of your rights 'undue'?
I believe they should let the advocacy and informative message run.
The message is sensational, but no more so than any other ad with an agenda (i.e. all of them) and many travellers through YVR (Canadian or otherwise) would benefit from considering what they may be compelled to share, without warrant or regular safeguards, with CBSA.
And if CBSA wants to run a sensational, informative, and fear-based campaign of their own, let them. (As if they already aren't.)
If this were a frequent event it'd be fine, but it's a rare event, so I'd rather be chill. Like having a big ad saying "Your plane could crash" before the gate. No thanks. Not worth it.