As programmers, we tend to view the world in a very "black and white" fashion, similar to our security model: If it's public, there is no expectation of privacy.
But the world is not like this ... shouldn't be like this. While there should be both technical and legal mechanisms in place to prevent privacy abuses, it does not mean that, if they're not there, we should simply expect governments to do as they please, log everything, put us in all sorts of databases, make those databases accessible to all sorts of people, etc.
Yet you're sending this in cleartext over the internet...
Different situations have different expectations and outcomes.
Given that the post can be used to send dangerous physical objects, it seems prudent to maintain medium-term records of what was sent and where to assist in the prevention of this type of terrorism.
Because the alternative, is we wait till it happens, we have no record of where anything came from, and then we get to engage in a multi-month campaign of opening and inspecting mail arbitrarily considered "suspect" to try and prevent the next round.
what makes your example "terrorism" and not "crime"?
Call it what you want: if we have no records of where mail was sent from and where it got delivered too over a medium-scale timeframe, we are seriously limiting any ability to deal wit this type of activity effectively.
The term "letter bomb" is a real thing that was and still is really done.
Or do they forge a return address and use a distant mailbox?
Mail data didn't catch the unabomber - has it caught anyone?
That mailbox is generally surrounded by other people who might notice it's comings and goings, or unfamiliar characters posting large packages.
Frankly, the idea that metadata can't help us solve crimes but it can obviously be used to nebulously control a population is an oxymoron. Either metadata is useful, or it isn't. If it's useful, then why isn't it useful or potentially useful for dealing with crime? You can't have it both ways.
And of course government efforts in "The War on Terror" would never be abused, right?
So I don't really see the scanning of the outside faces of letters to be a privacy issue. But I reserve the right to be appalled at the things the government might do and probably already does with this information, independent of how they acquired the information.
An argument of the same structure would be: Simply playing russian roulette is still not a threat, if the chamber will be empty.
Well, yeah, _if_ - it's a threat precisely because you do not know whether that condition will hold, and there is a reasonable chance that it won't; if you knew, it wouldn't be a threat but either a boring game or a method of killing yourself.
Also, why would your argument not apply to medical information, say? If they collected your medical information from your doctor's office to then blackmail you with it, that is not a privacy issue because they could also have come to your door and asked you about your medical history, and that would also be unacceptable, wouldn't it?
If I understand your argument right, it is roughly "if 'they' can do something bad in more than one way, then either of the ways is not bad because it would still be bad if the other way was used"? I'm not quite sure how to make sense of that.
Also, one anecdote from history: The nazis when they invaded the Netherlands used existing census information on religious affiliation that was easily available on hollerith punch cards to find and deport the jews. Would you say that that information collection was not a threat for the jews who probably got killed faster and in larger numbers than if the data had not been available in that form?
edit: One more example to consider: A dictator is not a threat, if he doesn't do anything that would still be inacceptable if it was done by a democracy. Well, a dictator is a threat exactly because you don't know that, and we tend to prefer democracy in order to protect ourselves from that risk of having a dictator of the bad kind.
I think what you're missing is that I'm not saying that nothing counts as a privacy violation. Medical information, for example, absolutely has an expectation of privacy, but I claim that the outside of your envelopes does not. My point is that the mass collection of information, where there is no expectation of privacy for each piece of that information, is not itself a privacy violation. What people do with information is not what determines whether the collection of that information constitutes a privacy violation.
First, there isn't really such a thing as a generic "expectation of privacy". There is not just "public" and "private", it really is all about necessity and consequences, about who needs to know what and what the potential consequences (good and bad) are when somebody gets to know something about you. If I walk around outside, I don't consider it a violation of my privacy if people don't close their eyes in order to avoid seeing me. Yet, I would very much consider it a violation of my privacy if someone started following me with an HD camera (maybe even streaming it to the internet?), even though they are just "doing something else with the information encoded in the electromagnetic waves reflected from my outside into the public sphere". Or if someone started pointing medical diagnosis equipment at me in public in order to figure out from that same "public informaton" stuff that I very much might consider private. A black-and-white distinction between "public" and "private" information is useless, as there is no such thing - not every personally identifiable information is either not to be shared with anyone or good for printing in the newspaper, most of it is somewhere in between: One expects it to not be a secret, but still to only be shared and used within limits for some sensible reason and purpose. So, I expect my doctor to share my medical info with his assistants as needed, but not to publish it in a book, I expect the info on the outside of letters I send and receive to be read and used by the postal service and people working there for delivering them, but not for publishing a list of my correspondence in the newspaper - and that very much for privacy reasons.
Secondly, the simplest reason for why mass collection itself can be a violation of privacy is that there is information in the collection that is not in the individual datum, that is to say, information that only becomes recognizable once you look at the collection as a whole with the right tools. From a single letter, you cannot construct a social graph of a society, but from all the letter meta data, you most certainly can.
Another angle to look at it from is to think about it in epistomological terms: Do you think that the work of scientists increases the knowledge of humankind? After all, they are just using "public information" (observations of nature, that is) and transforming it into usable theories about the world. I would think that that work makes a huge difference in terms of the use of that "public information" by humans and the effects of that use, which is why I would say that they are increasing our knowledg. The collection and analysis of personally identifiable "public information", I would argue, has the same effect on the knowledge of the party collecting and analyzing the data about the people that this information is about, namely, they are gaining knowledge about those people as a result of that collection and analysis, and if that knowledge is something that I consider private, I might as well call this investigation a violation of my privacy.
Of course, I agree that there is subjectivity when it comes to expectation of privacy. Not everyone has the same expectations, and group expectations change over time. But I do think that privacy comes down to expectations, not to necessity or consequences. I think some actions with good consequences are violations of privacy, and some actions with bad consequences are not violations of privacy. The goodness of an action's consequence and whether that action is a violation of privacy are orthogonal.
> Yet, I would very much consider it a violation of my privacy if someone started following me with an HD camera (maybe even streaming it to the internet?), even though they are just "doing something else with the information encoded in the electromagnetic waves reflected from my outside into the public sphere".
And I would not consider that a violation of privacy. At some point, I believe it could constitute harassment or stalking, but not a violation of privacy. It would seem that we have different definitions of "privacy." You seem to consider any inappropriate action which in some way involves personal information to be a violation of privacy. I do not, and I believe my definition more closely matches general usage. Privacy is about the ability to control which bits of your personal information area are available to which individuals, not what people do with your personal information after they have it (unless of course what they do includes sharing it with more people).
> Or if someone started pointing medical diagnosis equipment at me in public in order to figure out from that same "public informaton" stuff that I very much might consider private.
That's a different example, and I suppose it would depend on what diagnostic equipment we're talking about. For example, I do believe there is expectation of privacy when it comes to X-raying on a public walkway.
Yep, I agree. What I meant is that the expectation of privacy tends to be determined by expected necessity and consequences. People tend to expect privacy where they expect sharing/collection/distribution of information to have (potentially) bad consequences for them and there is no reasonable need to do so that would justify the risk. And my point is that the expectation of privacy is not a function of just the data, but also of the (intended, potential) use. You expect your letter to be delivered, therefore you expect that the address information on it will be used for that purpose (after all, having the letter delivered is your goal, and you are willing to give up as much of your privacy as is reasonably necessary to reach that goal), but you do not therefore expect that same information to be published in the newspaper, hence it's neither "public" nor "private", it's "for those involved in delivering this letter for the purpose of delivering this letter", just as medical information is "for those involved in making you healthy for the purposes of making you healthy".
> You seem to consider any inappropriate action which in some way involves personal information to be a violation of privacy.
Nah, I don't think that is quite it. It's more about the collection and processing of information for purposes that are not in the interest of the person the information is about in a way that reveals information about them that they could not reasonably have expected to be revealing when they revealed whatever information is being collected and/or analyzed. Privacy ultimately is about an individual's ability to predict and have control over what other people and institutions know about them while still being able to function in society, though not primarily "control" in the sense of "forcing to know or forget", but in the sense of "being able to estimate the consequences of sharing some information", as in "being in control of your life". The ability to function in society might require forcing at least computers to "forget", though, as open complete surveillance, while somewhat predictable, prevents society from functioning well.
> Privacy is about the ability to control which bits of your personal information area are available to which individuals, not what people do with your personal information after they have it (unless of course what they do includes sharing it with more people).
I think there is uselessness lurking somewhere in that definition ;-)
Does a government database count as an individual? Does government employees looking at the database constitute sharing? Does that control, at least in some cases, encompass new knowledge derived from previous knowledge in ways the affected person could not possibly have envisioned? If not, how do you resolve the conflict with the person's supposed control, if yes, how do you resolve the conflict with other people's supposed freedom to do with the information they have whatever they want (apart from sharing it)? Would blackmailing you with information about you be a violation of your privacy, if the person blackmailing you does not actually intend to share the information with anyone? How about just collecting information with the goal of possibly blackmailing you later (though again without any actual intention to disclose any of it)?
Somewhat out of order:
> I do not, and I believe my definition more closely matches general usage.
I'm not sure what the general usage is, but in any case I think the general public is far too confused about what information is and what automated information processing can do and can be expected to do in the near future for many to have any coherent, let alone reality-conforming concept of privacy (just look at the repeated high-profile cases of failed anonymization of datasets! their goal obviously is "privacy", and yet they fail miserably ...).
I might agree that your definition is probably close to a reasonable working model of privacy in the pre-computer era. But if you apply that too literally to today's world, I would expect you to end up with a practically useless concept that ignores many real-world problems that result from the collection and analysis of personally identifiable information. If you want to insist on such an outdated definition, well, there obviously is nothing fundamentally wrong with that, I just don't think there is much value to such a concept, and I'd rather define some privacy2 instead that has meaningful applicability today.
> That's a different example, and I suppose it would depend on what diagnostic equipment we're talking about. For example, I do believe there is expectation of privacy when it comes to X-raying on a public walkway.
Well, how about a camera that can detect heart problems from the pattern of blood flow in your face as it can be detected using high-speed high-resolution video in bright sunlight? (No clue whether such a thing exists, but I think we can agree something similar in some way or another should be technically within reach at least?) Also, what if the camera is actually just a high-speed high-resolution camera that doesn't do any diagnosis itself, but the video it records can later be analyzed on some computing cluster?
Seriously, I just don't get it.
Are you just saying that it's not surprising that it's possible for people to archive data they get to see? Well, yeah, obviously so, but that's just completely besides the point, as nobody is surprised it's possible (at least nobody here is, I suppose) - if anything, I'm surprised that people do such unethical things.
This is about ethics, not about technical possibility.
If the military of my own country tomorrow started bombing my neighbourhood, I also wouldn't be surprised about the technical possibility of dropping those bombs on my neighbourhood, I would be surprised why the heck they would do such an evil thing.
I can have a reasonable expectation of not being bombed by my own military because I expect them to be ethical (well, let's forget the question of whether military is ethical at all for the moment), not because it's impossible for them to do so.
It's the same reason why I expect not to be stabbed to death on the street even though I don't wear any armor, why I expect that nobody starts following me on the street as soon as I leave the house, making HD recordings of my every move for archival, and why I expect that nobody puts up telescopes and infrared cameras around my house to capture and archive all of the electromagnetic radiation that leaks from my personal life out into "the public".
Your notion of "reasonable expectation of privacy" is just naive and completely misses the point that this behaviour by the postal service poses a serious risk to society, and that risk does not go away just because it's unsurprising that they are technically capable of abusing their position of being able to see all the letters in transit.
If you choose to start shouting at someone on the street and the police listen in (without a warrant), then you can't claim that your fourth amendment rights were violated - you made the choice to communicate in such a way that any number of people could have heard you. Subjectively, you couldn't have reasonably expected your conversation to remain private and objectively, society does not generally regard shouted messages as private. On the other hand, if you have a conversation in your home then it would be a violation of the fourth amendment for the police to listen in without a warrant because a person does not expect to be overheard in one's home and society considers one's home to be a private space.
The point isn't whether or not the police were technically capable of listening in. The point is that in order to claim that an act was private you actually have to take some steps to demonstrate that you want and expect it to be private and that society in general would expect it to be private. If you seal a letter in an envelope then you clearly want the contents of that letter to be private. On the other hand, if you write something on the outside of the envelope where any number of people can see it, you have a much more limited claim on how that information is used.
A good example is how the SCOTUS ruled that there was an expectation of privacy regarding IR cameras. Very few houses have any kind of real shielding against IR leakage, but the use of IR cameras was still rare enough that it would be unreasonable to expect the average citizen to take specific steps to defend against that intrusion. The average citizen expects they already had a reasonable amount of privacy.
The implication, of course, is that this is something that can change over time. If IR cameras became commonplace, it would be reasonable to assume a lack of IR privacy. At that point, it would indeed be prudent to expect people to take additional steps toward securing their privacy.
This "community standards" distinction is particularly relevant re: data mining, because relatively few people have any idea how powerful the table JOIN can be, and as such DO expect a certain amount of privacy regarding their data.
Now, if I had known that you were using the phrase in that specific sense, I'd simply have asked: Where did you get the idea that anyone has an expectation of privacy (in the legal sense), and what does that have to do with the topic at hand (which is people's expectation of privacy (in the non-legal sense))?
I think you are completely confusing "what the law (possibly) is" with "what the law should be". This discussion is about what the law should be, but all you seem to be writing is "but the law is this!". This whole discussion exists because the law as it stands is defective, and people are aware of it (or maybe the law is actually fine, but then it at least tends to be mis-interpreted), so your pointing out what the law is is kinda besides the point. My actual expectation is that the postal service does not archive letter meta data and I have good reasons for that expectation. If the current law doesn't mirror that expectation, then the law needs to be changed.
Now, if you think the law is fine as it is and as it is applied, you maybe should bring forward some argument for why the law is good as it is and why a change would be bad rather than just state what the current law is.
Also, one more point: I would guess that society in general would actually not expect their letter meta data to be archived, and just as it is convention to not open a sealed envelope (a very strong convention indeed, given that it is law, but still it's just a convention in the sense that there is nothing inherent in an envelope that makes the content private - it doesn't really hinder access to the content at all, it's just that for good reasons society at some point has decided "a sealed envelope is not to be looked inside even though it's trivial to do so" when it just as well might have decided instead for a convention of "every sealed envelope is to be opened by the postal service and the content copied and archived"), it should for similar reasons be convention to not archive letter meta data even though that also is trivial to do, and if that is the convention, then all you have to do to "demonstrate that you expect privacy" is to post a letter that is not explicitly labeled "please archive!", just as you "demonstrate that you don't want to be shot" by going outside without a sign saying "please shoot me".
When the laws governing this were written, it was generally impossible to do what they're doing now, so it wasn't specifically addressed.
Claiming that impossible to predict growths were not specifically covered does not mean that they shouldn't be covered, merely that the people who write our laws aren't oracles.
It may not be illegal, but it's clearly against the intent with which the law was written, and should be addressed by a new law which reflects the growing power of technology in society.
There is no need for this.
What I expect is its existence to be forgotten as soon as each step in the process is completed.