Is it a natural right to keep your personal life from being commoditized?
Posted by RobertFl 7 years, 2 months ago to Philosophy
With Facebook, Google, Equifax, etc collecting all kinds of information about us, what you like, dislike, what you buy, your politics, do they have a right to collect that data, analyze it, and sell it?
What liability do they have, say, when they get it wrong? Like, they analyze you and concluded you're X when you're really Y. Have you ever tried to get an error fixed on a credit report? Pretty hard, usually all it is is a note in the folder no one will ever read.
What is the limit between someone drawing conclusions on you based on their personal observations (they like the color red, and are allergic to peanuts), and someone collecting and selling it? When do you lose ownership of the information.
What liability do they have, say, when they get it wrong? Like, they analyze you and concluded you're X when you're really Y. Have you ever tried to get an error fixed on a credit report? Pretty hard, usually all it is is a note in the folder no one will ever read.
What is the limit between someone drawing conclusions on you based on their personal observations (they like the color red, and are allergic to peanuts), and someone collecting and selling it? When do you lose ownership of the information.
Of course there can be liabilities with respect to making inaccurate negative statements about someone.
Who has the right to hold your personal information (SS, phone, mothers maiden) what responsibility do they have to secure it (or sell it)?
Can a receipt be sold? Is that not a record of a "private" transaction? Why is selling my SS# or CreditC# wrong, but not the fact I bought a bottle of whiskey? What is the agreement between customer and merchant regarding our transaction? Why is it ok to sell my birth date?
What about these funny, ambiguous Terms of Use agreements, "by using our service you agree we may disclose certain information to other 3rds parties 'we feel may be of service to you'". Nope, no disclosure as to who, when and what. Shouldn't we have the right to first refusal?
There are zealous laws against hacking computer systems -- some of which improperly make legitimate private activities illegal -- but organizations are allowed to collect whatever they want through surveillance with no accountability for what they do with it and how they carelessly expose it.
This is not a matter of a "natural right" but a problem of how to formulate laws protecting rights when new technology is developed. It is crucial that it be pursued in that form and not allowed to become another excuse for government regulation controlling how companies or anyone else operates as opposed to defining and enforcing the relevant civil rights. The government establishment approach is 'never let a crisis go to waste' for gaining more power.
There is no mention of defining what rights of the individual are violated or how to objectively enforce them, just vague, open-ended "complain to your government", "Market failures like this can only be solved through government intervention", etc.
Here we go again, but no one should be surprised.
There has been no "market failure", only the usual failure of government to objectively define civil rights in the context of a new technology and enforce them. The Orren Boyles of big business, which is rarely any defender of the rights of the individual and political freedom, have simply exploited that. It's another failure of government, not the market.
Putting government bureaucrats in charge of "regulating" what people can and must do in the name of "security" through non-objective laws would be the usual regulatory disaster, including in this case the crippling of unapproved innovative security, arbitrary edicts, time- and resource-consuming bureaucratic red tape, posturing and delays by bureaucrats to protect themselves from responsibility (as at the FDA) -- all driving up costs artificially -- and a mechanism giving government surveillance agencies their long sought "back doors" and security-crippling intervention for their own benefit at the expense of our rights.
The big data brokers like Equifax, Facebook and Google have a lot invested in surveilling, compiling, buying, and selling other people's private information, with us as their product, and will not easily surrender any of it. This has been let go for so long that much of the internet economy is now exploiting it.
At first, regulations would be heavily influenced by such companies writing regulations to regulate themselves, with their own privacy-violating goals built in as they rush to 'compromise' by being part of a new regime -- just as the big health insurance companies 'pragmatically' allied themselves with the secret planning of "single payer" Hillary Care in the 1990s when they thought there was political momentum to put it over. It isn't correcting a market; it's literally fascistic.
Under changing administrations in the future, the usual ideological turf battles would cause wild swings in policy and in what interests are being served by fiat (as with the history of the FTC and FDA), until another government bureaucracy eventually becomes thoroughly entrenched, sitting on an entire field of technology, destroying our freedom and hobbling our ability to produce, use it, innovate, and protect ourselves.
Yet the author of this CNN article calling for vague government intervention and control is Bruce Scheier, an internationally respected security expert with strong civil liberties leanings and support of privacy. He has written numerous books, including a classic text on the mathematics of cryptography, is the Chief Technology Officer of IBM Resilient -- a security company he founded and sold to IBM, is an expert on and has personally reviewed the Snowden documents, is a critic of the massive government invasion of privacy while supporting the need for government security agencies in principle, and is on the board of the Electronic Freedom Foundation.
But with his well-deserved fame has come his affiliation with establishment academics such as the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where he lectures, and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School https://cyber.harvard.edu/ -- where the influence of progressive Pragmatism and statist economics reigns and is glad to ideologically influence him while exploiting his reputation and genuine desire to solve a problem. They don't know any better either.
In Scheier's defense of privacy he has, despite his inclinations for freedom, indicated no understanding of the proper principles of government to protect the rights of the individual under objective law with limits on power -- like most people he makes no distinction between protecting objectively defined rights versus vague powers of government regulation naively expected to somehow address a real problem without creating more and worse problems.
Once again, we are expected to believe that a bureaucracy of 'technical experts' who know what is best can be trusted and expected to tell others what to do under non-objective powers.
Schneier has called for government intervention against what he is calls the "market failures" previously, but with the latest Equifax scandal and the growing public anger over a real problem, the danger of destructive government regulation without protecting the rights of both consumers and technology producers is growing.
https://cyber.harvard.edu/publication...
Partisan Right-Wing Websites Shaped Mainstream Press Coverage Before 2016 Election, Berkman Klein Study Finds
"The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University today released a comprehensive analysis of online media and social media coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign. The report, "Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election," documents how highly partisan right-wing sources helped shape mainstream press coverage and seize the public’s attention in the 18-month period leading up to the election.
"In this study, we document polarization in the media ecosystem that is distinctly asymmetric. Whereas the left half of our spectrum is filled with many media sources from center to left, the right half of the spectrum has a substantial gap between center and right. The core of attention from the center-right to the left is large mainstream media organizations of the center-left. The right-wing media sphere skews to the far right and is dominated by highly partisan news organizations,” co-author and principal investigator Yochai Benkler stated. In addition to Benkler, the report was authored by Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, and Ethan Zuckerman.
"The fact that media coverage has become more polarized in general is not new, but the extent to which right-wing sites have become partisan is striking, the report says."
https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/337...
"In this study, we analyze both mainstream and social media coverage of the 2016 United States presidential election. We document that the majority of mainstream media coverage was negative for both candidates, but largely followed Donald Trump’s agenda: when reporting on Hillary Clinton, coverage primarily focused on the various scandals related to the Clinton Foundation and emails. When focused on Trump, major substantive issues, primarily immigration, were prominent. Indeed, immigration emerged as a central issue in the campaign and served as a defining issue for the Trump campaign.
"We find that the structure and composition of media on the right and left are quite different. The leading media on the right and left are rooted in different traditions and journalistic practices. On the conservative side, more attention was paid to pro-Trump, highly partisan media outlets. On the liberal side, by contrast, the center of gravity was made up largely of long-standing media organizations steeped in the traditions and practices of objective journalism. "
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/ha...
"The more insulated right-wing media ecosystem was susceptible to sustained network propaganda and
disinformation, particularly misleading negative claims about Hillary Clinton. Traditional media accountability
mechanisms—for example, fact-checking sites, media watchdog groups, and cross-media criticism—appear
to have wielded little influence on the insular conservative media sphere. Claims aimed for 'internal'
consumption within the right-wing media ecosystem were more extreme, less internally coherent, and
appealed more to the 'paranoid style' of American politics than claims intended to affect mainstream media reporting."
Your instruction about Harvard Law School came too late, I am pleased to report.
I only posted it as a secondary follow up because I had mentioned that Law School group earlier in contrast to Schneier's other background. Otherwise it belongs in another topic, maybe like Hillary's book with the same nonsense..
Schneier gave an interesting account of the Equifax ordeal. He identified how it happened through negligence and one basic source of the problem as the fact that privacy is being inevitably violated for people who are the "product" not the "customer". He gave some interesting technical proposals that the data brokers have no incentive to implement.
Schneier full testimony: http://docs.house.gov/meetings/IF/IF1...
Video of Schneier summary presentation: https://youtu.be/4_ydofXb7mU?t=2460
Qustions and discussion followed the witness presentations in the video.
But instead of calling for defining and protecting property rights, he generally called for more vague government controls and rules for security ('authorize the FTC to figure out what to do') as the false alternative to what he calls "market failure".
As previously discussed on this page here https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post..., of course "the market" will not automatically protect rights; it isn't supposed to. That is what a proper government is for.
But this is being used to argue for more improper government controls of the usual kind, in the name of 'doing something', as a solution to the growing privacy problem instead of protecting the rights of the individual. Apologists for the data broker companies are just as bad as they try to avoid or minimize government action of any kind; they don't want their free ride off their "products'" property rights to be stopped. Others have no idea what to recommend and are likely to vote for anything to give the appearance they are supporting their constituents.
But as the law is now, we're stuck with the status quo. And I'm sure Google and the rest have plenty of lobbyists paying bribes to keep it that way.
In the business world, 'resources' are not Free and neither is an individuals profile.
I'm still waiting to be asked what I choose. To be or not to be...part of this system and if so...what's in it for me.
Some of the responsibility is on the person who buys info from a credit bureau or social media company. One company might hire people based on credit score, figuring if their credit's all messed up, their life might be too. Another company might dig in deeper, not using the score. Maybe someone tricked the bank into lending them money by forging someone's signature, commonly called "identity theft". The bank might wrongly trash the credit of the person whose signature was forged because they want to collect from someone and the impostor is broke, hiding, etc.
I don't call it identity theft b/c it's a case of Party A impersonating Party B to get Party C to give money to Party A. Party A is a crook. Party C got defrauded. Party B's good name is at risk if everyone believes B took the money instead of an impostor.
These are age-old problems of people tarnishing someone's good name based on an honest misunderstanding/disagreement or intentional slander. The information doesn't travel by horseback anymore, but it's the an age-old problem.
Equaifax can provide a credit evaluation without divulging any other information. I think it's very dangerous, to us, to allow them to be a source of personal information.
If someone already knows your phone number, and address, you do not need to fill-in missing information for them.
No need to reply back with: "and their birthday xx/yy/zzzz".
(Of course, no one has a right to fraudulently use your Social Security number, even if you are dumb enough to put it on the Internet, put putting it there is still a dumb thing to do).
cation (and often employers won't take those), when they do a background check, maybe they will put your information on the Internet, even if you don't. I get around some identity problems by not having a credit card. Mostly I pay for what I want with cash or money orders.
With all that plus the cameras everywhere they don't even have to try to track you with chips in the coins and paper bills you pay with.