It's simply not possible any more, except via face-to-face chat, to communicate with someone without turning over some metadata (or possibly data) to a 3rd party.
Letter? Envelope gets scanned. Calls? Logged and your location is tracked to boot. Internet? Tapped. What's left?
Anyway, if you're face-to-face with someone they still tracked both of your positions to/from the meeting and used cameras in the area to run facial recognition. Then they transcribed the convo to text by hijacking area mics or using the cameras for speech recognition.
If you're really important they'll land a tiny UAV on your person and literally 'bug' you. Better to just stay inside and keep your waste in mason jars...
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/29980598/ns/world_news-weird_news/...
Having ubiquitous automated surveillance is effectively the same as having someone follow everybody around with a camera and microphone, so the public's reaction to the latter should be used to determine policy with regard to the former.
The lack of privacy in public spaces is such because it's unreasonable to have an expectation of privacy. Until we're all cyborgs and have our vision automatically filtered, it's unreasonable to expect that you will remain unseen when walking through a public park.
The lack of privacy in public spaces is based on the ubiquity. If you followed someone around, the issue isn't a violation of privacy. It's harassment: the singling out of an individual for exceptional behavior. If you plant a camera and watch everyone, then it becomes a lot more OK. (Still arguably not, but you'd get far fewer "unhappy reactions".)
It's only unreasonable if you say it is. Different cultures have made different decisions with regard to what's socially acceptable to notice about others' behavior in public. It's perfectly reasonable to expect that you will remain unfollowed when walking through a public park, and ubiquitous surveillance is much closer to following everybody than noticing everybody.
If you plant a camera and watch everyone, then it becomes a lot more OK. (Still arguably not, but you'd get far fewer "unhappy reactions".)
I'd argue this is only because people aren't cognizant of the fact that planting a camera to watch everyone is the same as planting people to follow everyone. People's instincts haven't caught up with the reality that is presented by ubiquitous surveillance, so IMO the right way in this case to decide whether surveillance is acceptable is by analogizing to the closest available cultural and instinctive concept that is still fully functional.
The issue is still that you're likening surveillance to harassment more than you're likening it to an intrusion of privacy. Based on this argument alone, I'm less inclined to agree with your position, because surveillance isn't harassment.
> People's instincts haven't caught up with the reality that is presented by ubiquitous surveillance, so IMO the right way in this case to decide whether surveillance is acceptable is by analogizing to the closest available cultural and instinctive concept that is still fully functional.
You realize you're not saying anything more than, "I think it's wrong, so I'm going to go searching for a rationalization," right?
I don't disagree that the surveillance we can safely suspect is being done by governmental organizations is probably immoral and should be illegal, but what I'm not hearing is a solid, justified argument for your position other than, "It's icky." You don't even have the fallback of "everyone thinks it's icky" since by your own admission, people don't.
I'm not interested in doing that hard philosophical work, personally, so I'll leave you with a suggestion. Privacy, at its root, is really about dignity: its most ancient manifestation is the capacity to relax without tainting one's public image, whatever that image may be. It is from this foundation that all other arguments about privacy are really built. So I'd challenge you to show that ubiquitous surveillance necessarily violates everyone's dignity.
I think you'll find that more difficult than you expect, but I don't think it's impossible to come up with a reasonably sound proof.
You're still using definitions of privacy violation, surveillance, and harassment with which I do not agree. The distinctions between the three don't have to be drawn where you seem to be drawing them, and both the example I gave and invisible surveillance should qualify as all three.
By the way, would you still call it harassment if you never got in the way of the person you were following, never acknowledged your presence, and generally let them go about their business while you were busily recording everything they did? Most people would still be very unhappy.
You realize you're not saying anything more than, "I think it's wrong, so I'm going to go searching for a rationalization," right?
That's not the case at all. I've raised arguments that appeal to technical people in the past, and users like rayiner jump in with a claim that "common people" just don't care about technical stuff. Now I'm using arguments that appeal to the aforementioned "common people," and you're jumping in to say they aren't technical enough :-).
Moreover, I was responding to your specific claim that "it's unreasonable to expect that you will remain unseen when walking through a public park."
I'm not interested in doing that hard philosophical work ... but I don't think it's impossible to come up with a reasonably sound proof.
I don't expect to conclude the privacy and surveillance debate once and for all in this thread. No doubt Bruce Schneier, the EFF, and others are way ahead of us on formalizing the best arguments.
Google "paparazzi". Notice the distinctions between a legal claim of privacy intrusion and the legal claim of harassment. And also, notice the legal claim of freedom of the press.
Your model of "people with cameras following you around" might sound really novel and clever to you, but we've had such people for a long time. And guess what? In public, no one considers it a privacy intrusion. It's harassment.
> Now I'm using arguments that appeal to the aforementioned "common people," and you're jumping in to say they aren't technical enough
Technical arguments are not philosophical arguments. Believe it or not, programmers do not have a monopoly on The Right Way To Do Everything. A philosophical argument can depend too much on jargon and be perverted by political spin, this is true. But you can still methodically break it down and explain it to a non-technical person if you've put it together well.
Watch http://justiceharvard.org sometime.
Failing to convince someone is your fault, not theirs.
... they certainly are:
People keep saying that in this debate, as if it's some sort of self-evident principle that must not be questioned, but is it anything more than a meaningless tautology? Aren't you in public by definition in places where you have no privacy? If so, then being in public is defined by how we define privacy.
The public/private distinction has never been absolute, such that everything about you and what you're doing is either in public or in private at any given time. We're sharing our thoughts on a public forum on the Internet, but at least one of us is physically sitting in his own home while doing so. I have different expectations of privacy for what I'm saying on HN vs. the conversation I just had with someone in this room.
The lines are similarly blurred if we go out. For example, in most jurisdictions you do not give up all rights to privacy just because you went out your front door. If a guy follows you around with a video camera and tries to watch you enter security details when you're paying for stuff at a shop, he's probably going to get in trouble. If a public venue installs video cameras in its bathrooms or changing rooms, it's probably going to get in trouble. If some pervert tries to film up your or your wife's/sister's/daughter's skirt, he's probably going to get in a lot of trouble. These things are all easily possible with technology, and all happen in a "public place", yet I think almost everyone would still consider them unacceptable invasions of privacy and the law in many places would prohibit such behaviour.
Maybe as technology that can be used for surveillance and data mining evolves, we need to evolve our understanding of what should be considered private as well, in order to maintain effective protection of the same underlying values. If metadata alone can now be used to determine sensitive details about us that we would consider to be private if collected directly, then perhaps the collection and use of that metadata should be controlled in the same ways as direct collection and use of the implicit data. If sensitive data is collected for one purpose with consent but can now be repurposed more easily for additional uses, maybe there need to be explicit safeguards to control that risk.
Taking creepshots is totally divorced from the private/public issue. It's kind of like trying to make S&M into a private/public debate.
The simple fact that it can be stripped from some (who are famous) and retained by others (who are not famous) even when they are both in the exact same public space means that some people (i.e. the non-famous) have a reasonable expectation of anonymity in public - which is to say, a certain form of privacy - where the famous do not.
And that's not the only fault with the "you have no reasonable privacy in public" line of thought when it comes from people who say that technological advances have, in effect, made us all famous. The assertion is valid only if reasonable expectations are limited by what is and is not technically possible, which is not the case. In truth, we need a sense of privacy to function as free humans. You can't have a working democracy without it. To the extent that it's reasonable to expect whatever level of privacy a functioning government of the people, by the people, and for the people requires, you maintain a reasonable expectation even when advancing technology renders you vulnerable.
Ultimately, the thing that keeps people from kicking in our doors isn't the thickness of our doors, but the strength of the laws that restrain those who would do the kicking.
To date, we've been able to rely on technical hurdles to protect our absolutely essential sense of privacy. If technological advance means those days are behind us, then we need the law to do what previously it didn't have to deal with doing. That transition still needs to happen. But at no point in the course of this transition does the reasonable expectation itself go away. Indeed, it becomes even stronger no that it can no longer be taken for granted.