Privacy Harm Is Harm
eff.org
eff.org
But, having spent a couple of years in the privacy space. People choose convenience over privacy 10/10 times. No amount of cookie banners, privacy notices and user consent are going to change that. There are so many cases of data abuse by EVs, Governments, etc. once you dig a little deeper than the surface
It needs to be part of the law that companies are simply not allowed to abuse your data like they are currently. The GDPR was a good start, but it needs to keep going much further.
Driving a car on a public road is a public, social act, which requires licensing and abiding by numerous rules.
A license plate is a token of registration in a public database, required to be displayed. Registration is required because people can cause enormous harm with a vehicle directly, and also use a vehicle for fleeing from the scene of a crime. Not to mention that vehicles can be stolen.
If license plates are private information, then I'm violating privacy by writing down the license plate of a vehicle that is fleeing from a hit-and-run.
Bull. Fucking. Shit.
If you want a vehicle that lets you go wherever you want and do whatever you want without being identified by your vehicle, use a scooter or bicycle or any other unregistered, unlicensed form of transportation.
If you can't get me to care about this "privacy" issue, your narrative is screwed, because I'm in a vehemently pro-freedom libertarian demographic.
I agree.
Not suggesting you are saying that, but there's a spectrum of what it means for behavior to be public.
Sure, my location is technically public in the sense that sometimes people see me when I go somewhere. But I would much rather not always be recorded with gps location and video and audio to be stored forever and available to those in power.
You have lots of privacy in public.
You don't get to legally conceal the identifying marker attached to a two-ton murder weapon on wheels that you either own, rented, borrowed or stole.
That's it.
My comment even mentions that you have options if you want an unmarked wheeled vehicle for staying as private as possible while yet locomoting at a decent pace.
“What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.”
This “lack of privacy in public” absolutism would mean that there would never be certiorari granted for these types of cases in the first place.
Reductionist at best, IMO
See also United States v Jones, Carpenter v United States
your assertion of credentials is thoroughly countered by the information which is shared in your profile.
Of course, that leads you to a flawed conclusion.
> because I'm in a vehemently pro-freedom libertarian demographic.
That demographic hasn't had a very good track record on privacy recently, has it?
1. OKAY: Telling your boss that you saw his car with his license plate on the freeway.
2. WORSE BUT STILL NOT BAD: Telling some friends and coworkers how crazy it is that you ran into your boss's car on the freeway.
3. NOT OKAY: Using a camera network to report on your boss's license plate location in real time.
4. VERY NOT OKAY: Using that extra information to conclude that his wife is pregnant and that he's job searching, selling him out at your current employer for some financial advantage.
5. EVEN WORSE: Doing that to literally everyone, coupled with a side of illegal and scammy advertisements just for good measure.
Our society depends heavily on some things staying reasonably private. You're right a single piece of license plate information isn't that important. What's happening though is some combination of:
1. Attempting to combat companies who don't give a rip about privacy and are keen to exploit loopholes (and for a host of other reasons), the law is stricter than it needs to be.
2. Once somebody else has committed a felony you usually have a lot more leeway with respect to your ensuing actions. Unless you've ever frowned in the direction of Trump, no prosecutor will hold that against you, and nearly every judge will throw it out. You'll want a stronger example.
The identifying info attached to license plates can be kept safeguarded. Even so, license plates can be used to fingerprint a vehicle. Eyewitnesses can attach identities to license plates; e.g. you can easily know the license plates of acquantances such as neigbors and recognize them in a different context.
Some kind of technological solution of nonce license plates. They would have to use display technology, making them fragile, poorly visible, prone to various malfunctions.
Likewise, license plates are fine, full real-time surveillance of all movement in your country probably not great and not something the public wants.
Almost of these slippery slope issues are scaling problems, especially in privacy. Tracking people with cookies at your site, probably fine, using third party cookies to track everything your visit on the internet, maybe less great. Etc etc.
Legislating scale seems to be something that is particularly difficult since it’s easily argued, as you did, that’s it’s not inherently bad.
They are in the middle of asking a court to clarify what the law means by the word "harm". That is not settled as yet. Things like that get settled by litigation. They are taking a position in such litigation.
The article doesn't make a case. They are just saying "nuh uh" to the decision the court made.
This is, by the way, playing catch-up, privacy has been an internationally recognized human right for many years. I’m just trying to help you see human rights from a perspective other than “something somebody is ordering me to care about”.
It's as if we're no longer capable of conceiving of something that is bad independent of that thing causing harm. Consequently, in order to express sophisticated moral concepts in our guttural pidgin of a moral vocabulary, we need to use combinations of words that are facial absurdities, like "privacy harm is harm".