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Comment by kerkeslager | Hacker News Reader

> People want their data to be public and all of the benefits that comes with public data but then they want to chose who gets to see it - it's a complete and utter paradox.

That's a complete misconception. Of course you can find manufacture inconsistent ideologies if you combine ideas from different people, but I think you'd have a difficult time finding one person who believes what you just described.

What I want is, put simply, organizational transparency, personal privacy. I believe humans have a right to privacy, but I don't believe organizations have rights, period, and I believe radical transparency within an organization prevents organizations from trampling the rights of individuals.

Organizations in this case include corporations, governments, and nonprofits.

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I'm interested in hearing your take on "organizational transparency". Like please push the concept / idea to its 'full' realization and tell me that picture, even if it implies a little bit of "sci-fi"¹.

Digging this because I think that domain / paradigm will see unparalleled evolution in the next few decades.

[1]: I mean, don't stop at current law / values / behaviors; like people from the 1940s wouldn't have dared speak about their idea of the 1970s because they'd think their belief "impossible". No flying cars though (Clarke-tech), because that's not a decision of the individual.

I don't think that looking too far ahead is useful: this is just a matter of pragmatics. Revolutionary change in a peaceful society happens via a long sequence of small, incremental changes, and that's a good thing, because you get to see how each of the changes plays out. I think the best sci-fi persuades you that it's looking at the distant future when in fact it's only using the future as a foil to provide deep insight into the present.

The short-term, the small, incremental changes I'd like to see are:

1. Reversal of the default privacy setting of government docs. Instead of documents being default-private and citizens having to make FOIA requests to make those documents public, documents should be default-public, and government workers should have to apply through and adversarial system (similar to courts) to classify documents, proving to a court why the document needs to be classified.

2. Classified documents should have a short (1 year max) timeframe after which they are declassified, or government workers should have to reapply to justify why the documents need to remain classified.

3. Political party documents should be public, without any provision for classifying them.

4. Tax-exempt organization documents should be public, without any provision for classifying them.

5. IPO'ed organization documents should be public, without any provision for classifying them.

6. Body cams on all police and military while on duty (when they are acting on behalf of an organization). 1 and 2 would apply to the footage from these cams as well.

7. Exceptions to 1-6 should be made for the personally-identifiable information of people who are not in the organization.

8. Organizations should be required to maintain a list of all the personally-identifiable information they have on a person (including employees), and provide that data to that person on demand by that person or their legal guardian, as well as a list of all people with whom that data has been shared, and be required to delete that information upon request by that person or their legal guardian.

9. Research which receives public funding should be forced to publish its results publicly.

10. All software which receives public funding should be forced to publish its source publicly.

11. Government documents should be published in open-source formats suitable for computer analysis (i.e. CSV, text, or some XML format--no PDFs).

Can't agree more with your first paragraph.

1, 2, 6, 11 should be no-brainers if people were educated IMHO — but this is 1920 relative to electricity or cars; still a long way to go before the mainsteam masses get it (which very much includes political figures). I would think 2030-2040 for the emergence of ethical consensus and concern (the kind that pervades political parties and social classes).

That is assuming the needle doesn't move too much farther in the authoritarian direction until then (the 20-year trend is really not looking that way currently).

3, 4, 5, 9, 10 are/would be met by strong opposition from interest groups, I'm sure you see that too. Everything I know about 3 tells me it's never going to happen with current parties / politicians. It's at least 1 generation away and I'm not sure the concept itself isn't utopia. 9 and 10 as well, I think it largely depends on the cultural paradigm (and this world's in 2020 is really not aligned with that, nor does it trend or even look that way). 4, 5 likewise, complex topics, lots and lots and lots of gatekeepers and lobbyists.

My take on these is they're very costly in terms of political capital; and they are largely debatable (politically, legally, philosophically, etc., you'll find passionate captains on both sides); thus there are 'better' (more consensual, with direct net positive effect) lower hanging fruits imho.

7 and 8 are hard problems, notably because of scale and the need for automation — it's part of a much bigger domain, automation of compliance and building "trustable" systems etc.; the kind that bridge or plane engineers must build, and probably software engineers too, but you know we're far from that if you read this forum.

I'd say 1 2 6 11 and 7 8 on the way to scale/automation already paint a whole different regime and degree of maturity for a 21st century State. I'd like to think we're now ~1 generation away from enactment of such norms.

What if the organization is one person in an LLC? Do they get rights? If so then a big company can hire a bunch of little LLCs to act as rights-having proxies for any task that requires them.

I'm going to assume you're asking in good faith and try to address the confusion here.

The human does get rights, the organization doesn't.

In some cases, believing that humans have rights and believing that organizations have rights might lead one to the same action. In those cases, I'd take the action. I wouldn't want to violate a human's rights out of some vindictive dislike of organizations: that's not the point. The point is that I'd take that action because I believe in human rights, not because I believe that the organization has rights.

And with organizational transparency: the entire point of organizational transparency is to protect human rights. In cases where organizational transparency would trample human rights to privacy, I would go with human rights every time. Violating the privacy of humans to achieve organizational transparency would defeat the entire purpose.

Let's say that individual humans have the right to keep secrets. Let's also say that they have the right to keep secrets with their associates, and to tell them to who they please. Now, doesn't that make it legal for a group of people to keep secrets about you? What about selling them? I just don't see what doing away with the legal fiction of corporate personage would do about Facebook.

It may not be your intent, but you're using some very vague, inapplicable terminology to make some screwed up behavior sound normal.

If you can tell secrets to who you please and sell them on the internet, they aren't secrets. Somewhere in the middle of what you're saying, the secrets stopped being secrets, but you kept using the word as if it still applied.

Facebook isn't a group of associates trading anecdotes about their friends: the server guy has never met Mark Zuckerberg, and they are not "associates" in any meaningful way. They're not friends, or even really allies: Facebook certainly has shown inconsistent concern for the well-being of its workers. So let's also drop the "associates" terminology: these aren't "associates", they're employers and employees. Employees aren't acting as individual humans on their own behalf, they're acting on behalf of an organization.

Putting aside the rights conversation for a second, let me ask you a question: if you tell your friend a secret in confidence, and they turn around and sell it to anyone on the internet who will pay a low fee, that would be pretty screwed up, no? We don't even have to talk about rights here: this is just screwed up behavior, regardless of the rights conversation.

"Now, doesn't that make it legal for a group of people to keep secrets about you?"

A group of people sure, but corporations are not people.

Corporations are groups of people.

Corporations are a power of attorney document. They are golems that sometimes act on behalf of people. They are not people.

Are contracts allowed in your worldview? Contracts must be signed by individuals, but when they act as representatives of a company, they are legally binding for that company. If they only have individual rights, then all individuals who didn't physically sign a contract cannot be held to it.

Correct.

At a small scale, it makes sense for people to appoint another person whom they trust to represent them in negotiation. But in a lot of cases, that's not how representatives are chosen. Particularly in corporations, the leadership of a corporation was not chosen by the employees to represent them, and in fact often doesn't even have the best interest of the employees in mind. A lot of the largest problems in our society arise from this fact.

Consider the case of a company that agrees to sell to a larger corporation, under the condition that they lay off half their workforce in advance of the sale. Surely we can agree that the laid-off workers were not fairly represented by the person signing the contract.

One could argue that the workers agreed to give up some of their rights in their employment contract, but I'd argue that they did so under duress: their option is sign the contract and work for the company, or starve and let their families starve. Sure, they can go work for another company, but other companies will require them to similarly sign away their rights.

This shouldn't be taken as a recommendation to blithely break contract law. Corporations don't have rights, but they do have power, and it would be unwise to behave as if they can't make your life miserable if you decide to cross them.

> The human does get rights, the organization doesn't.

Organisations are (usually) legal persons, too; they just have fewer responsibilities, get fewer rights in exchange.

That's how things are, not how they should be.

No rights, full liability would be a bad deal too.

A bad deal for whom?

It's a bad deal for corporations, but I do not care. Lack of liability is the cause of a ton of problems in our society.

Just to pick two stories of corporate sociopathy: Probably the reason people at State Farm are unconcernd about forging signatures[1] is that they know that the worst case scenario is that State Farm loses some business and maybe gets a fine: they are unlikely to go to jail for forgery or to have fines exacted from their personal bank accounts. Similarly, when Practice Fusion literally killed people[2], their execs had little to fear: nobody went to jail, nobody was fined: shareholders who had no visibility into the decision paid the fines.

When banks tanked the economy with irresponsible lending most were bailed out and gave their workers bonuses, while the people who were unable to pay their mortgages were ignored.

A little more liability for destructive behavior would be great for most people.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22177812

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22165946

> they are unlikely to go to jail for forgery

Forgery is criminal regardless of private or official document is concerned. Even in a military setting, forgery of business-related documents are illegal.

> A little more liability for destructive behavior would be great for most people.

Why not full rights, full liability? Replace imprisonment and death by temporary and permanent suspension of company (including re-establishment of a sequel organisation out of a subset of stakeholders) respectively; and voila.

That's an optimistic theory, but read the link I posted and decide for yourself if you think anybody is going to end up in jail for it.

It seems like you're just picking out one aspect of each of my posts to disagree with. Do you have any disagreement with my overall point?

The person and the LLC are legally separate entities, although an LLC is often passed through for tax purposes.

Making organization membership public would trample on personal privacy quite effectively in some respects, such as with disease support groups or PACs; medical privacy is taken seriously, but is there such a thing as political affiliation being private? Is it a violation of someone's privacy to reveal they give to the ACLU?

This is where pseudonymous identities make a lot of sense.

In a world where organizations are radically transparent and individuals have radical privacy, before you join the disease support group or donate to the ACLU, you already know the organization's records about that transaction will be public information.

You can restrict your activities to organizations that do not keep personally identifiable information. Or you could join the support group with a pseudonymous identity or donate cryptocurrency to the ACLU.

The entire point of organizational transparency is to prevent organizations from trampling the rights of individuals, so in cases where organizational transparency would trample the rights of individuals, the rights of individuals supersedes the need for organizational transparency.

So, should it have become public knowledge that Brendan Eich donated $1,000 to support Proposition 8?

I'm gonna need some context there. To begin with you can't just donate to support a bill. What you probably mean is that he donated to an organization or politician who supported Prop 8, so say that.

The important detail is whether the funds were his personal funds, or whether they belonged to his company: i.e. was he acting on his own behalf, or on behalf of an organization?

It's an inane question, though, because the inane point you're trying to make is that individual privacy might protect homophobes. That's true, but it would also protect gays and allies who donated to oppose proposition 8. The fact that privacy allows people to secretly donate to political campaigns is the point. Part of the reason gay marriage is legal today is that people donated to people like Harvey Milk, at a time when donating to the campaign of a gay governor was risking your job and social standing.

Human rights still apply to humans who do bad things. If you are willing to give up human rights to fight bad people trying to do bad things, then those rights won't be there to protect good people trying to do good things, either.

So a person spends money to support an odious cause, and that person gets money by being associated with an organization. You hate the odious cause, so you want to avoid giving your money to support people who will then give money to promoting that odious cause. How does that work? Do you no longer have the right to not indirectly support things in your ideal system?

Since you're just openly ignoring the post you're "responding to", I'll just copy-paste my response to what you have just said, with some minor changes:

> So a person spends money to support an odious cause, and that person gets money by being associated with an organization. You hate the odious cause, so you want to avoid giving your money to support people who will then give money to promoting that odious cause. How does that work? Do you no longer have the right to not indirectly support things in your ideal system?

Yes, but it would also protect people who donated to a virtuous cause. The fact that privacy allows people to secretly donate to political campaigns is the point. Part of the reason virtuous causes have had any success at all is that people donated to support them, at a time when donating to those virtuous causes was risking your job and social standing.

Human rights still apply to humans who support odious causes. If you are willing to give up human rights to fight bad people trying to support odious causes, then those rights won't be there to protect good people trying to support virtuous causes, either.

> Since you're just openly ignoring the post you're "responding to", I'll just copy-paste my response to what you have just said, with some minor changes:

I'm attempting to clarify my question by removing irrelevant details, which it looked like you got hung up on last time.

> Human rights still apply to humans who support odious causes. If you are willing to give up human rights to fight bad people trying to support odious causes, then those rights won't be there to protect good people trying to support virtuous causes, either.

So you are willing to make it impossible for people to boycott organizations as a means of social change, as long as those organizations had an arms-length relationship with anything "political".

> So you are willing to make it impossible for people to boycott organizations as a means of social change, as long as those organizations had an arms-length relationship with anything "political".

No. Please try to respond to what I actually say instead of making stuff up; this is a straw man argument.

There are plenty of other ways we could find out about organizations supporting odious causes and boycott those organizations, without violating the privacy of their members. In fact the the point of "organizational transparency" is to make it hard to hide when organizations do bad things.

In addition to accusing me of saying things I didn't say, you're ignoring what I actually did say. Are you willing to make it impossible for people to privately donate to virtuous causes as a means of social change, when donating to support those causes publicly so would be a risk to their careers and reputations? I'm not going to continue this conversation further if you won't respond to this point.

> I don't believe organizations have rights, period

So a group of people, joining together in a common cause, don’t have rights as members of that group?

You are contradicting yourself. Organizations are simply groups of people with a shared cause. To deny rights to the organization, you necessarily have to deny personal rights. Example: John and Sam form an organization for comic book collecting. They have a secret meeting to agree on a price to offer a potential seller of a rare comic book. Since John and Sam, Inc. “Have no rights” the seller is allowed to sit in the room during their meeting. However this violates the right of Sam to freely associate with John and his right to not have to associate with the interloper. It also violates the privacy of San and John as individuals since their private conversation — even as members of their two-man organization are now being shared with anyone who wants to sit in since, in this scenario, their organization doesn’t have rights.

It’s absurd.

> So a group of people, joining together in a common cause, don’t have rights as members of that group?

Emphasis added. No, they don't. They have rights as individual people.

> [...] this violates the right of Sam to freely associate with John and his right to not have to associate with the interloper. It also violates the privacy of San and John as individuals [...]

Yes, that. "Sam" and "John" would have cause for civil (and probably criminal) action against the interloper. "John and Sam, Inc" has no say in the matter.

It might be useful to grant John and Sam, Inc the privilege to own property, but even that isn't actually a right except insofar as Sam and John have a right not have the value of their assets (ie 50% ownership of John and Sam, Inc - functioning as a proxy for ownership of various comics) actively sabotaged/vandalized.

> Organizations are simply groups of people with a shared cause.

No, they're not. As soon as you have two people in an organization, you've got two different causes. The shared elements of those causes allow them to collaborate, but each of them has slightly different views of what they're working toward. And even when you have a very small, well-specified goal, every individual in the organization has different levels of investment, and other values and boundaries they're not willing to cross to achieve that goal. And the larger organizations get, the wider the variety of disparate goals that can occur within the organization, because individuals in the organization may not even interact directly with one another.

Example: John and Sam work for Facebook. John and Sam want to make money to feed themselves and their families, and don't want to have PTSD. But Mark Zuckerberg wants John and Sam to look at an endless stream of horrific PTSD-inducing images so that he can maintain the reputation of the Facebook platform and get incredibly rich. Where is the shared cause here, exactly?

> To deny rights to the organization, you necessarily have to deny personal rights.

Just because an organization doesn't have rights doesn't mean we have to go out of our way to take away their rights.

> Example: John and Sam form an organization for comic book collecting. They have a secret meeting to agree on a price to offer a potential seller of a rare comic book. Since John and Sam, Inc. “Have no rights” the seller is allowed to sit in the room during their meeting. However this violates the right of Sam to freely associate with John and his right to not have to associate with the interloper. It also violates the privacy of San and John as individuals since their private conversation — even as members of their two-man organization are now being shared with anyone who wants to sit in since, in this scenario, their organization doesn’t have rights.

It sounds like you've figured out that John and Sam, as individuals, each have a right to have a private conversation. John and Sam, Inc. doesn't have rights, but that doesn't suddenly remove John and Sam's individual rights.

The entire point of organizational transparency is to protect the rights of individuals, so obviously if organizational transparency would violate the rights of individuals, the individual rights to privacy supercede the need for organizational transparency.

It's telling that your example of an organization has two people in it. At a small scale, organizations tend to protect the rights of the individuals in the organization fairly well. It's at larger scales that the non-rights of an organization come in conflict more often with the rights of individuals.

You see this inconsistency in individual people all the time. Like how almost everyone wants to be found easily on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc, so they add a public profile photo. Then they freak out because someone starts scraping these photos to build a facial recognition model.

I think that comes from ignorance of the implications of uploading their photo, not from an inconsistency in what they want.

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