Privacy Is a Human Right
blog.torproject.org
blog.torproject.org
As companies share more information with governments, they are able to learn more and more about their citizens. Take Facebook, a company that Laura Poitras described as 'a gift to intelligence agencies'[1]. Facebook allows governments to arrest people planning to participate in protests before they have even begun. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Our privacy is eroding. As a society, we are beginning to accept this lack of privacy as normal: and this is extremely dangerous. Privacy provides a place for us to be ourselves, to express ourselves in new ways without fear of being watched by preying eyes. If we lose privacy then we lose this ability to experiment, and, more importantly, we lose our power.
[0]https://aeon.co/essays/privacy-matters-because-it-empowers-u...
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/10/23...
I understand your point is that our loss of privacy didn’t lead to arrests or in these instances, but there has almost certainly been arrests in other instances, and we’d be losing sight of the bigger picture if we deluded ourselves into believing oppressive governments, companies, billionaires, etc.. weren’t already heavily using mined data to counter dissidence movements in more ways than just arrests.
There is no commercial incentive to do any of that
It is remarkably difficult for such a thing to happen. Very little is needed and that that is tends to be rather obvious.
I am reminded of the TV series "The Prisoner" out of BBC, especially the final episode "Fall Out Pt2".
Expounds about "the individual's right to be individual", community, the status quo, and so forth.
And over that "no" is a complete sentence that needs no more explanation.
A quote from that article: "There are numbers here, there are no names, so you can't expect it to end like James Bond, so you have to have an allegorical ending. Now (...) what is the most evil thing on earth? Is it jealousy? Is it hate? Is it revenge? Is it the bomb? What is it? When one really searches it's only one thing, it's the evil part of oneself that one is constantly fighting until the moment of our demise. The Jekyll and Hyde if you like, but on a much larger scale." —Patrick McGoohan. Which reminds me of Sad But True by Metallica.
Actual real privacy would be between two parties that trust each other and encrypt their communications in both directions. That means no Facebook servers to intercept your commentary, send you advertisements, and send friend suggestions.
NOTE: Emails are correspondence and we all know, that our emails are shared with governments...
The argument seems to be that we have rights because the UN says so. Who or what endowed the UN (or anyone else) with the prerogative to declare human rights?
Let's imagine a that the UN would change its mind and declares the right to eternal salvation, and mandates that every state submit to the authority of the holy see.
If the current rights are "true" human rights, and the right to salvation is a "false" human right, what sets them apart given that the UN in this hypothetical scenario declares them both? How do rights become true or false?
Not «true or false»: part of the "social contract".
If two people (or groups) are arguing over whether something is part of the social contract, how can we tell which of them is correct?
This also seems to go against the spirit of human rights. How can we motivate minority rights in a society that feels justified persecuting minorities (i.e. in a society where minority rights are not part of the social contract)?
might makes right. That has always been the case in nature, because it's the only way that worked so far.
Of course this is a bit circular reasoning because this works only if everyone abides by these rules, so in practice protects only against relatively 'mild' infringements and situations (i.e. the people are expected to be reasonable enough not to vote extremists in power... if not, all bets are off but that's true of all laws)
It's self feeding problem. The only solution is slowly to deny government power over people.
Historically, "might" correlated near perfectly with "population size". From Sumer onward, the size of your army & slave count determined right-making (in the UN sense). Exceptions due to technology innovations were sparse and short-lived.
Therefore subsequent evolution has been mostly around how to manage large groups of humans, through "social contracts" and various domestication measures. The social configurations that managed better, won over those that did worse.
In other words, huge centralized states have been a huge evolutionary success. There are pretty much no independent ("sovereign" when it comes to right-making, UN or otherwise) small groups of humans any more, they got all gobbled up by superstates.
But I wonder if our institutions have fully caught up to the fact that the number of humans is near-irrelevant now. With the right technology, a small group can dominate millions, billions. And their necessary supply chain is tiny, relative to the purported UN jurisdiction – by a factor of at least 1000x.
So "democracy as right making" is at DIRECT ODDS with "might as right making". I wonder how this clash between where the power resides (technology and its homeostatic supply chain) and where people think it resides (themselves and their divine individuality) will play out. The emperor has no clothes.
What?! The contract is defined in its normative constitution. It's written! It's dynamic - your service provider sends you an update to the contract: you don't like it, you cease rapport.
The issue we have today is with the relative lack of options.
In the case of the DoHR: once accepted, that is part of the contract. Effectiveness to be defined (for example, inconsistencies with a [Statal legal] Constitution are noted by a higher court which can nullify proposed laws).
The UN declaration holds power precisely because it is a declaration, members agree on it.
Life is not a computer program or a math equation.
Rules do have exception, especially in complicated systems like "the entire world".
If by "this is a useless set of rules" you are saying "oh, c'mon! This is not the law"... then yeah, you're right. It's not legally binding. It says so in the first paragraphs of Wikipedia. But it was useful to others as a framework and model.
How can we complain about western countries violating our privacy defined by some ruleset defined by organisation that decided it's a good idea to make genocidal state member of a human rights council of said organisation.
It is the framework used for creating things that are binding: laws.
Even so, something someone else does can "violate my personal beliefs", even if they're not really legally binding. Nothing strange about that.
Saying "something violates human rights" is a shortcut to saying "Something violates a set of rules that are the framework of our societies, and those rules are important enough that they managed to seep into our laws and influence our thought, and our world. We should pay attention to that violation, and maybe crack down on it."
> How can we complain about western countries violating our privacy defined by some ruleset defined by organisation that decided it's a good idea to make genocidal state member of a human rights council of said organisation.
Literally by doing it. Just because the UN is not perfect, doesn't mean it automatically retroactively invalidates a certain text that we hold to a high standard.
The current state of the UN really makes no difference on the text itself. Even if someone in the UN goes wacko and decides to rewrite the text, we still have a previous copy. Just fork it.
and failed miserably at doing any of that.
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> The argument seems to be that we have rights because the UN says so.
That's not the argument. The reasons we have human rights is because individual countries decided to implement them.
The Universal Declaration itself is not legally binding. It's just an agreement that participating countries decided to implement into their own laws.
UN can't force countries who didn't vote into it to implement. They can't even force countries who actually voted for it to implement it.
However, individual countries have the freedom to complain or stop trading with countries who don't implement, or on countries that implement but don't follow. Out of the things that countries do to each other, this seems like a minor thing.
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> Who or what endowed the UN (or anyone else) with the prerogative to declare human rights?
Nobody.
Anyone can declare human rights. I've declared a few myself yesterday during tea time.
The Universal Declaration carries its weight because it was made and approved by the countries themselves who took part in the UN at a certain time. It's not as if some crazy person at the UN has the power to change something in the document at their will. And even if they did, so what?
People routinely suggest new human rights and some people agree and others disagree. There is no higher court or secret world parliament deciding your life.
You asked "How do rights become true or false?". Well, by becoming new laws in individual countries.
If neither is correct (or both simultaneously), is it even a meaningful statement about the world to declare a human right like Tor does?
Yes. Tor is correct and Facebook is wrong. I said it. Other people might say otherwise, but I'll say they're wrong. (and they are)
In societies it is normal to have disagreements.
What people do is discuss the issue and potentially reach an agreement. Maybe this will become a law somewhere. Maybe it will go into the Universal Declaration, and most countries will implement it. Maybe not. After becoming a law, people will either follow it or not. If they sort of break the law, a judge or peers will decide if they need punishment. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. Who knows.
Life is not a computer program or math equation. Life is a bit hard.
If you tell me the angular sum of a triangle is 180 degrees, I cannot see it directly with my senses, but I can construct a simple proof with pen and paper that shows me it cannot be any other way than what you told me.
How do you experience the truth of the human right to privacy?
Societies are much more complex than that.
I can try to convince you that this is right, if that's what you're asking. But no, there won't be a math equation or an scientific measurement that proves that it is correct. Because we're humans, not numbers or bits.
I can't touch something like a social contract or an ideological standpoint, I don't know where it is are or how long it's been there, when it happened, how intense it is, whether it has any properties, whether it was caused or can cause; these things don't appear to be like anything that in any sense can be said to exist. If these things are gods, then for the sake of this conversation let's call my position an agnostic one.
Society is complex, but even complex things are built from the parts we can see and touch, and since our senses are the only means we have for interacting with the world, even impossibly complex things must somehow be relatable back to them (unless there is some additional channel in which knowledge enters our minds?).
If something is so nebulous that it is completely built from things we can't experience in any way other than being told about them, then how can they be said to exist at all, how could we tell this tale apart from complete fiction?
What do you mean by "prove"? You can easily extend your skepticism to any body of knowledge. The empirical sciences ought not be given a free pass merely because of some unexamined (and incoherent) prejudice like scientism.
Everything can be said to be a matter of opinion, so that does nothing to clarify the subject.
The bigger question here is: why does a moral statement can only be valid when it's valid in absolute? Why does it have to have a proof that's easy enough for a person that's willingly choosing to ignore knowledge?
Why do we assert that this-and-that is a human right in such a context?
Also, the "is-ought" problem follows from a particular (very problematic) metaphysics. It does not follow from an Aristotelian understanding of metaphysics.
Why is it problematic?
> It does not follow from an Aristotelian understanding of metaphysics.
Aristotle's metaphysics does also carry some baggage. It is contingent on an unmoved mover/active intellect that creates not only motion but purpose in the universe.
Although his ethics can broadly be taken at face value as long as you agree with the proposition that your purpose is to flourish as a human. It does seem to work pretty well, although the question he was truly answering was how to be a happy individual, whereas the meaning of ethics has shifted over the millennia to deal more with civic virtues than personal ones.
No, it flows from propositional logic, which is not a metaphysics. You can't have an “ought” conclusion with only “is” premises.
A metaphysics may assume “ought” axioms and thus support “ought” conclusions from only “is” additional bases, but then you still aren't getting an “ought” from an “is”, you are getting it from the “ought” you assumed with your metaphysics.
All you're saying here is that we've agreed on a principle that implies what you're saying is true. This is the exact same as what the other commenter is saying.
They killed Socrates for asking too many of these types of questions.
This is the opposite of Socrates. He started from the premise that he knew nothing. In this discussion here, you're asking questions from the premise that already know most things about the subject. Also, this is not why Socrates was killed, please do some reading instead of jumping on another meme.
Also: comparing yourself to Socrates for asking fallacious questions is peak Hacker News. Don't think I ever saw such arrogance.
I merely just wished to have a discussion on how we do determine what right "should be" a human right, and what makes it a human right, or simply, a right to begin with? It is actually quite a lengthy topic, and for example Rothbard has written a lot on how human rights are property rights and so forth. We could have gotten to animal's rights as well! I suppose one could brush it all under the rug with the term "subjective", but I would rather not stop there.
But in any case, this is my only defense for the OP. I have no idea how one would "experience the truth" of a human right, I would need some more answers before I get to know what the OP has meant by it exactly.
As for the Socrates stuff, I have no comment on that.
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Allow me to quote some Rothbard:
> There are several aspects of this important truth. In the first place, each individual, according to our understanding of the natural order of things, is the owner of himself, the ruler of his own person. Preservation of this self-ownership is essential for the proper development and well-being of man. The human rights of the person are, in effect, a recognition of each man’s inalienable property right over his own being; and from this property right stems his right to the material goods that he has produced. A man’s right to personal freedom, then, is his property right in himself.
> But there is another sense in which human rights are really property rights, a sense which is much obscured in our time. Take, for example, the human right of freedom of assembly. Suppose that a certain group wants to demonstrate for a particular idea or bill in a street meeting. This is an expression of the right of assembly.
> On the other hand, suppose that the police break up the meeting on the ground that traffic is being disrupted. Now, it is not sufficient simply to say that the right of assembly has been abridged by the police for political reasons. Possibly, this was the case. But there is a real problem here, for maybe traffic was disrupted. In that case, how is one to decide between the human right of free assembly and the "public policy" or "public good" of clear and unobstructed traffic?
> In the face of this apparent conflict, many people conclude that rights must be relative rather than absolute and have to be curbed sometimes for the common good.
Taken from https://fee.org/articles/human-rights-are-property-rights/.
Feel free to call BS on it. Kinda is. Ultimately it's the human might that supports rights.
Can a country create a right for more living space for some of its citizens?
The social significance depends on how the believers act. Some discipline themselves, some try to persuade others, some start a war, some try to push through legislations.
That is precisely the reason why some highly controversial UN resolutions were passed right after the second world war. It's almost ironic that China now wields so much more power over the path the UN is taking than the old colonial powers.
But whenever people say this or that is a human right, we ought to remember that a lot of the things that are legally defined as human rights were at some point defined by some old colonial overlord until it wasn't. The founders of the UN definitely didn't think that people of any colour were the same or that interracial marriage is a human right.
One thing is for sure, despite one of its own Supreme Court jurists championing the idea of a "right to privacy",1 America now has some of the poorest privacy protection, culturally and legally, of any country. This intended disregard for privacy today puts money in many Americans' pockets, particularly the Silicon Valley crowd.
1 https://archive.org/stream/jstor-1321160/1321160_djvu.txt
Was talking to someone in their 80's in the US about the telephone service they had as a child. Operators could listen in on calls.
But did they. Honest question.
Operators certainly were not jumping into a call and injecting advertising. Nor were they recording metadata, e.g., who someone's contacts are, call history, etc., to support an advertising service.
Operators sometimes knew callers personally IRL. This older person was telling me she knew her local operator and one time when she called someone twice in the same day, her friend the operator asked her why she was caling the same person again. "You just called her."
Operators could also make free calls and some did.
Did people back then have a better concept of privacy than young people today who have been brainwashed by SV.
But the issue here is the selective enforcement of these rules.
It's similar to geneva convention. You can't break it if you're not in war but only in "armed conflict".
The list of things that the UN has agreed to are values not because they are expedient or nice to have, but because they have been generally proven to be hallmarks of civilised life. Losing a right to privacy is much, much scarier than people having private facets of their lives.
And, if appeals to authority is what it takes to get people to agree to good ideas, then the UN is telling them these things are really good ideas. Better than whatever looks like a good idea in the short term then turns out not to be.
The answer in this thread appears to be - if enough of a majority of people in power say its true, then its true.
But if you're looking for natural rights you can perceive through your senses (which you have indicated elsewhere in this thread), then you have a bad understanding of reality. You already believe in a number of intangible "things" which you've never perceived...like the notion that things must be perceivable through the senses to be considered real. This is a principle, a false principle, but something that is nonetheless taken by you to be true about reality. Otherwise, what are you even talking about?
[0] But you're also asking a question that's a bit out of context. We are appealing to endoxa and the violations of privacy we are witnessing are unjustified given the general agreement about privacy as a right.
[1] Not to nitpick since the essential question still stands, but since you mentioned the Holy See...
> declares the right to eternal salvation, and mandates that every state submit to the authority of the holy see.
Catholics do not believe they have a right to salvation. Salvation is a gratuitous gift of God, in fact so gratuitous that good works alone cannot deserve it and faith is needed.
Here's how: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratification
There are attempts at infringing on privacy, yes, but we also see attempts at making privacy absolute, and I think the Tor Project is part of that trend.
The realistic and reasonable approach is a trade-off, as has always been the case. Usually this takes the form of strong legal protections of privacy but with exceptions controlled by the courts (e.g. warrants for searches and interception of communications) and parliaments.
Privacy is one of the very foundations of social and economic organization. It is deeply connected with ownership and agency. Holding on to a private piece of the information universe is what underpins also all civic and commercial activity.
It is not clear why we still just talk about privacy instead of actually doing something meaningful about it [0]. This is maybe the most glaring example of how modern society has degenerated / cannot solve any of its self-inflicted diseases.
[0] That's obviously not a critisism of the tor project :-), these early pioneers are the saving grace of our society.
I am not sure what your "we" refers to.
I am sure people can "do more" on improving privacy.
But in many places the concept "privacy" is vague, without much explanation of why it's an important concept. And I would like to see more discussions about this concept.
I do like you saying "Privacy is exclusively cast as an individual / personal concept".
Individuals are the smallest unit in our society and has the least protection against larger groups of people (e.g. companies, governments, other powerful groups). Privacy would be one of the concepts as basis of "individual protection".
maybe there reason there isn't more discussion about something so deeply relevant is that we are already in a stage where what is being discussed is pretty much channeled and controlled.
I would imagine if somebody declared "your property ownership is dead, from now on you own nothing" there would be quite a bit more discussion about it.
The enemies these days will come with "justice" and "ensure your safety" and "save you from dangerous X". And hey just at a price of "a little" privacy and freedom!
But modern technology has also made it very easy to rob or kill people in large numbers and we (generally) don't do that.
Whether "privacy is dead" or not is not a technological question, it is a moral, political, economic and social structure question. Legislation that is aligned with what society wants (or should want) and is thus enforced can be very effective.
If we resign and normalize the current status quo there will be nobody to blame for the dystopia but us.
To me, Tor is a software project that runs a network that allows users to be anonymous. Period. That anonimity can be used for good or evil, and everybody has a different sense of good or evil. Rebranding the project as a way to spread western liberal values is, in my opinion, overstepping the boundaries of what a software project should be.
(One can see an analogy between this change and the changes Mozilla took with their software. Unfortunately, there's no "better alternative" to Tor like there is to Firefox)
Anonymity is the right to remain hidden independently of your communications. Privacy is the right to prevent disclosure.
If third parties can access your correspondence you have no privacy regardless of your anonymity. If anybody can assert your identity you have no anonymity regardless of your correspondence, if any.
The inability to separately define these terms sacrifices them both.
This is unnecessarily inflammatory, and just makes it sound like "Tor doesn't see things as I do and therefore they are dumb".
Practically speaking, the question of privacy largely disappears if you are anonymous. The two terms are not orthogonal, even if they are also not identical.
"Anonymity is a human right" is much more likely to be questioned.
But as an end-user, do you really care about privacy if you are already anonymous?
I can think of situations where you would. But for most scenarios, it seems to me that anonymity renders privacy a moot question. At least that's the case for me --- therefore I also think that the statement "the terms are mutually exclusive" is fairly meaningless, at least for my own online activity.
My intuition is a lot of "regular" people (i.e. the non-hackernews crowd) would see it the same way...
Even still would you really be willing to give out all your financial and sexual preferences to a stranger even if you are anonymous? I suspect most people would continue to harbor reservations.
Privacy is choosing who knows what about you. Anonymity is a tool to do things in front of some people without them knowing who you are. Clearly if you don't want those people to know that you (your real identity) does those things, you require anonymity to maintain privacy in that respect.
> If third parties can access your correspondence you have no privacy regardless of your anonymity.
This is false. For example, a citizen in a repressive authoritarian regime can only protest the government "publicly" so long as they are anonymous. You can let all the world know that Anonymous4321 (if you have real anonymity) thinks the government is bad on Twitter and even leak government secrets. Sure, the protest will not be "private" in the sense that it is public, but the privacy angle is that nobody knows that the individual is involved in such activities: they can show up to work at the government the next day after leaking details about the government and nothing will happen to them. Clearly, from the perspective of their real identity, their leaking and protest activities remain "private" from the government even though the government very publicly is aware of the protests and leaks.
In the scope of TOR, it clearly helps individuals maintain privacy. I want to keep which sites I visit unknown to even my ISP; that is clearly your version of privacy. On the other end of the connection, I don't want the website operator to know who I am either; this is your version of anonymity. To me those are both just different aspects of the notion of privacy defined by: choosing who knows what about me--with that choice defaulting to knowing nothing about me.
Privacy is a broad category, anonymity is a piece of it, necessary only in some circumstances but generally desirable as a default. You can choose to give up your identity, you cannot choose to take the knowledge back from someone.
Tools like Tor or a web browser are not equivalent to a screwdriver or a knife. Google chrome is the way it is because Google does value money and power above people's privacy. The Macbook is not easily repairable because of Apple's values.
Tools do not exist in a vacuum, everything we do is political whether we like it it not. That's what political means, it amazes me how the meaning has been altered, especially in the US.
Only that they are. Tor is a software project that allows you to stay anonymous. You can use it to buy drugs, you can use it to whistleblow, you can use it to post intimate pictures of someone online, you can use it to circumvent the censorship of your government, you can use it to troll in forums. It's just a tool like a pen. Is a pen a political tool because you can use it to write the Mein Kampf?
>Tools do not exist in a vacuum, everything we do is political whether we like it it not.
It's precisely this attitude that is ruining the discourse in the west.
Opiates are a tool, and the moral calculus of being involved in their industrial production differs from the production of pens. Guns are a tool, and the moral calculus of being involved in their industrial production differs from the production of pens. Some things are designed for apolitical reasons, and yet a politics emerges around their use. The Tiki Torch guys didn't build their product to be political, and yet when they saw their product used in political images in Charlottesville, they felt the need to restate their values, and acknowledged that their product had become enmeshed in politics. That's how things work.
Even the parent comment doesn't draw the distinction fully enough. Knives overwhelmingly serve a prosocial purpose, humans have an almost infinite need to cut objects, especially as it relates to food production. But the use of knives in the context of interpersonal violence does merit reflection, product updates, and an expression of values. I think knife companies should and likely do reflect on the full set of uses of knives.
None of this prescribes an answer to any given question, I am not the kind of person who thinks that someone should be forced to declare a particular thing. But your insistence that the process of the question itself is "ruining discourse in the west" is not a very thoughtful take.
If the makers of Tor have considered the myriad ways in which their tools are used and want to support some ways, disavow others, and design for or against others, I think that's great, and hardly ruining anything.
I really like your comment and agree with what you've written, what I was going for (and failed to really spell out) is that by definition everything within the public sphere is politics. Everything that shapes or defines the relationships between groups or individuals is politics.
That's what one will find if he searches dictionaries for politics. But somehow the word has taken on new meaning and people manage yo argue nonsensically with it. I'm sure that people who argue like this against politics/things being political all have slightly different things in mind and noone understands the original meaning of politics.
Not all software projects, but certainly some software projects, specifically those trying to create infrastructure.
Over time, we have accumulated some wisdom that society is worse off when we try to politicize a bridge, so that only people with certain beliefs are allowed to cross the bridge, or make telephone calls, or use electricity, etc.
We want everyone to be able to make the telephone call and to cross the bridge. Even if they are going to commit a crime and the bridge helps them commit that crime. Even if they are not committed to western liberal values.
It is this type of apolitical treatment of infrastructure that provides numerous benefits necessary for the infrastructure to thrive:
1. You can't sue the bridge builder or telephone carrier if someone uses the infrastructure to do Bad Thing. This is necessary for the infrastructure to exist. Imagine if a telephone company had to worry about a kidnapper using their phones to make calls.
2. Much infrastructure becomes more useful as more people use it (network effects), in which case the infrastructure should not be fragmented where each tribe has to build their own rival infrastructure. It's more efficient for rival tribes to put aside their differences and have everyone use the same infrastructure. This is especially true in increasing scale situations.
3. Infrastructure that requires long term support and maintenance through a variety of different regimes will need to prove that it is not favoring one regime over another. For the bridge this can be government, but for a project like Tor, they will need the contributions of software developers that do not believe in the western liberal project together with developers that do. And certainly for users running exit nodes this applies as well.
Now against these benefits are the costs. Does it hurt you that your political enemy is allowed to also use the telephone to coordinate?
Well, from a pure power point of view, you would like to dominate and cripple them, but from the point of view of the infrastructure, no, them making a phone call does not prevent you from doing the same. So in that type of a situaiton, it's best to have a truce and say everyone is allowed to use and contribute to the infrastructure.
Now in some situations you can't have a truce because your hatred is so strong. Then you have war. That's when you deny your enemies access to your bridges while blowing up their bridges.
And they do the same to you.
But one thing about that state of affairs is that it's never good for infrastructure. When you politicize infrastructure, you get less of it.
So no, it's not a good idea to try to make everything political. This is true regardless of anyone's moral intuitions. It's an objective fact that society is better off when certain things are not politicized, especially infrastructure services.
Our difference lies in the definition of politics. I am not from the US and I hold to a more original definition, everything that has to do with how societies are structured, are governed and how they act is politics. Everything within the public sphere is politics.
In your example, building a bridge is politics, letting everyone through is politics. You can't make or unmake something to be political. It either is or isn't _by definition_.
That's not a definition, it's a philosophical position. A very toxic one that leads to dysfunctional societies and stuff not working and not getting built as people argue over politics.
[0] And/or the developers arrested: I’m so not a lawyer that I wouldn’t know even if I tried to read the actual statutes if that response was even possible in the USA
i would argue that it is simply a fundamental idea but sadly still a radical one, regardless on which part of the world you find yourself on
EDIT: by 'fundamental' i mean simply in the sense that the sentence, 'it is none of your business what i am thinking about', is fundamenal
Examples include Hobbes, Locke ( all persons are endowed with natural rights to life, liberty, and property), the US' founding fathers writings and debates, the French national motto of Liberté, égalité, fraternité, ...
You are correct that many/all western liberal governments are adopting very harsh laws contrary to these principles.
This does indeed call into question if these are still liberal democracies/republics.
It is the sad state of man that very few social structures are able to adhere to the principles on which they are founded.
i completely agree with this. however i think that today the phrase 'western liberal' is taken to mean as policies coming from brussels/washington, instead of ideas coming from the enlightenment period
it is also hard to divide judicial adoption of 'right to privacy' according to geography and political systems. for example, australia does not legally recognize the 'right to privacy' while russia does [0].
also curiously, as somewhat of an aside point, i just tried to find data retention laws in russia and this is best i could come up with:
"The Law on Personal Data simply provides that personal data should not be kept/processed for a longer period than is necessary for the purpose for which it is processed (unless longer processing and, in particular, retention periods are mandated by Russian law or by agreement of the data subject)."[1]
Of course this opens up the possibility for government mandated retenition, but do these laws exist? i would find it very surprising if they do not. does anyone here know? i am talking about written laws, not corruption or rule-of-law factors
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy
[1] https://www.dataguidance.com/notes/russia-data-protection-ov...
Would you expect a gun manufacturer to be apolitical, or would you expect them to support the right to self-defense?
A lock on a toilet does this. The ability to hide your IP address does this.
That """argument""" is what people without any experience, just come out a cave hours ago, could put in their head. Under Pol Pot, people had to hide eyeglasses. And this is just an example that stands for many other instances.
Why should the average be relevant. Phrased this way, it seemed that the object of concern are the grayest.
> with non-controversial [positions]
Are those who decide what takes the label of "controversial" reliable?
> Are those who decide what takes the label of "controversial" reliable?
No -- but the average person who finds themselves squarely within the Overton window will not find that concerning.
I found that this one doesn't work on Americans, they have some crazy 2 inch gap around the door haha
― Edward Snowden
"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care if someone watches you take a shit because you eat healthy food." - LocalH
The 4th amendment was penned back when you would have had to physically search my house or business for paperwork to learn anything about my financial books, I really believe that the original authors intended for me to mind my own business and the government and everyone else to mind theirs.
Freedom was free agency to exist and thrive in the land, unmolested and protected from encroachment from others by the government, rather than being a subject of the nation and a pawn of the government.
Taxes were something taken at ports during import/export, now not only is the representative system turned upside down but the federal tax collectors have turned inward.
The federal government was suppose to be an entity of management for external foreign relationships and mediation between states, now it’s getting close to mandating individuals to which private bathrooms they are allowed to invade.
Secrecy is where you prevent others from having knowledge of a piece of data, or explicitly share it with a limited set of others whom have the same ability to shield the knowledge.
This is not privacy obviously.
1. loss of control of knowledge. This is often the bit we worry about. We want to keep control over our data and data about us. But mostly this ship has sailed. Even if there was some reduction in tracking cookies and so on, the usefulness of widespread data collection (from traffic warnings to epidemiology) is enough for most of us to want those benefits in society
2. loss arising from others knowledge or use of data
To me this is the kicker. The use by others of our non-secret data-about-us should be at the level of medical data - held and used in the patients best interests.
We are entering a world of trolley problems - from how to code driverless cars reactions to what is an is not acceptable use of private data.
We need to recognise there is huge upside value in the tracking that happens now (and I hope we will see those benefits whatever) but there are pollution-like downsides and we can massively limit those.
The cost benefit analysis should make society judge the loss of a few million(#) in advertising revenue worth this
(#) I am dubious about the value assigned to privacy-breaching tracking to drive advertising versus say using the words people type in a search alone to give them a result.
1. A clear unambiguous security framework (HSM, FIDO, on disk encryption, standard terminology for roles access etc) that is just as common as HTML. There are so many competing strategies here let alone implementations that we just really need one winner that everyone can just drop in to their industry CRM / HR app whatever
2. Legal framework around private data that has social benefits baked in, but limits the crappy side.
3. Stop thinking we can solve the rest of the worlds problems (with technology). There is a tendency for say crypto or tor to think it will create another Arab Spring and whole world will be free. A far far better bet is to build our democracies better, clean out our corruption and uneven playing fields, to make a free and fair society that is just so damn enviable, others have to follow.
Anyway enough of that.
https://decrypt.co/84277/snowden-slams-sam-altman-worldcoin-...
I think the better approach is to take steps to stop the centralisation of power. Breaking up the mass media corporations, regulating ownership of media, introducing proportional representation and more direct democracy, abolishing the domestic intelligence services, etc.
Trying to ban technology just because it _could_ be used for bad things seems as misguided as it is ineffective. The security agencies and authoritarian governments can just ignore those agreements anyway.
- sent from my post-Bell breakup cellular connection but still totally Bell. (Southwestern... Some DNS responses still show SWBC!)
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is somewhat binding, but the U.S. has so many reservations and opt-outs that it has little impact on domestic law.
Human slavery was once completely legal in the United States, and before the declaration of human rights existed, and we could still call that a human rights violation.
23¢ an hour, maybe?
In general, he advent of information age had turned explicit many formerly implicit costs. I think a similar argument may be made about freedom, it has a cost and somebody has to pay for it (this is my way to reason about the seeming rise of autocracy).
And there are more reasons to believe that attitudes to privacy are changing for the better. Research by Demos found that half of young people in the UK said they were either extremely or very concerned by 'online privacy'.[2]
Arguably the biggest obstacle to privacy is the effort it requires. People perceive reclaiming privacy to be far harder than it actually is. But for most, privacy is achievable. As individuals, we have the ability to chose which services we use. You might just want to switch to a few more privacy respecting alternatives, using Startpage instead of Google, or ProtonMail instead of GMail. Sites such as Privacy Guides, of which I am a team member, showcase tools and knowledge to protect your privacy. It is surprising how few steps it can take to massively increase your privacy.
[0]https://www.securitymagazine.com/gdpr-policy?url=https%3A%2F...
[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/08/the-a...
[2]http://demos.co.uk/press-release/demos-young-voters-concerne...
https://www.reddit.com/r/offmychest/comments/qfk0zj/if_youre...
In the US, if you don't protect it and you lose it, it is your fault.
In the EU, No one can lawfully take it away from you.
* and some disadvantagse to privacy if the number of users is low.
the united nations also promises the right to affordable housing... where's my fucking house Blackstone?
Even just dignity implies privacy, and not being sold as cattle (selling the app with a userbase definitely qualifies).
Trusting Apple with your strongly-ID-linked payment cards for iCloud subscriptions to hide your IP from backend services is sort of a contradiction.
But that's neither here nor there.