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Lawrence Lessig: Technology Will Create New Models for Privacy Regulation

57 points by oznathan 11y ago

deleted 11y ago
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miguelrochefort 11y ago
None of these articles explain why privacy is a good thing. They just assume it to be a fact. I have some issues with this. What if the entire premise of privacy being beneficial is flawed? What if the actual problem is that we build systems and processes that rely on the unsustainable idea of privacy and the wishful ability to keep secrets? Do people not see that this makes everything more fragile and likely to break? I don't want more regulations for startups that want to analyze my genome, nor do I want to become an expert in internet security just to browse the web. Writing software is already difficult as it is, and the requirement to protect privacy makes it even more difficult and risky. The real question is, what can we do to make living a transparent and open life possible.
- jpollock 11y ago
  Humans lie all the time. We lie to each other, we lie to the government. We cheat, break rules and break laws all the time. Societies rely on privacy to limit the intrusion of others into our lives. It becomes really easy to avoid enforcing a law when you can't see it happening. For example, without privacy, sodomy laws become much easier to enforce. No longer would it be 2 closeted gay men living together happily, it would be acceptable for the government to setup a mobile array and detect that the two men were sharing a single bed, and then charge them with sodomy. Another example. In New Zealand, prostitution is legal. However, income information and receipts are private between the business and the tax department. Visiting a prostitute is generally frowned upon publicly. So, what happens when all prostitutes are "outed", and their customer lists published? Is that a good thing? Is it just another way of making the job illegal again, with all of the societal ills that making it legal was intended to avoid? For a US example, imagine publishing the health records from Planned Parenthood clinics - any and all. Venereal disease, birth control, abortion, anything. I don't see how we can prevent intrusion of individuals and governments into private areas of life without a definition and expectation of privacy. Particularly when there are differing opinions on morality and what the government should do to enforce it.
  - miguelrochefort 11y ago
    Are you arguing that it's my responsibility to be careful and discrete when I commit crimes that should be legal in the first place? If both murder and sodomy are illegal to the eyes of the government, then wouldn't more accessible privacy protect both murderers and sodomists? Clearly, the issues in the examples you describe are with the expectations of the government and its citizens. I don't want to ever have to lie about things I'm not ashamed of, and neither do I want to be ashamed of things I do. Society's foundation is Trust, and Trust starts with Honesty. We want everyone to be as honest as possible, and we should therefore change the system to motivate honesty. Only then will we have a clear picture of reality, human nature, and problems we ought to fix. I want lying to be considered as the worst crime. I want a currency that's built on trust. I want every commitment and promises to be tracked and evaluated. I want fairness, and it starts with understanding reality. We lie so much that we can't imagine a world without a right to it.
    - tremon 11y ago
      > Clearly, the issues in the examples you describe are with the expectations of the government and its citizens. I don't want to ever have to lie about things I'm not ashamed of That's wonderfully magnanimous of you. But do you think it's reasonable to expect all your fellow citizens to hold that same conviction? Just because you value things that way, doesn't make it applicable to everyone. What I hear you saying is that if everyone would just conform to your worldview, you'd have a much easier time living in it. Or do you think that your view is universal already? Also, privacy isn't a citizen vs government thing. Privacy is an expression of the power that every individual holds in every interpersonal relationship: the choice to share with or withhold information from another. And that is a personal choice. Ideologies like "you should not judge" are at least as old as the Bible, yet we still haven't overcome it. In fact, judging from most Twitter stories I hear of (or 4chan/reddit subcultures), I'd say we have seriously regressed as a society in that matter. Please have a solution for solving hate campaigns and other forms of harassment first, before suggesting that we remove discretionary power from every individual.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      > I want lying to be considered as the worst crime. I want a currency that's built on trust. I want every commitment and promises to be tracked and evaluated. I want fairness, and it starts with understanding reality. Hell yes. I too want people to start treating lying with seriousness it deserves. Lying, lying, lying. It's the thing that rots and destroys our societies. I too keep repeating that civilization starts and ends with trust. Trust people have in the system, towards their leaders, and towards each other. The less trust people have, the more defensive they get, more stupid things they do, and the less efficient everything becomes. A perfect example is the growth of various anti-science movements, anti-vaccination being a prominent case. Where do you think it comes from? Many like to say that anti-vaxxers are simply stupid, can't comprehend biology or are motivated reasoners. But the reality is simpler, and you can see it by just observing them carefully. They are normal people, like everyone else. They want to be healthy and happy. They want their children to be healthy and happy. The only real difference is that they had their trust in authority broken on a serious level. They don't trust doctors, scientific consensus and government health organizations. Is this surprising? Frankly, no. Because all of those authorities lie. They lie fucking big, and then they lie small. Not a day goes by when we don't hear about corrupt politicians, when we don't see bullshit papers published in respected journals, when we don't learn a drug is a scam, or plain dangerous. Governments lie, and so do businesses, big and small. They lie in ads, they cheat in stores, they sell us crap - from grocery store washing stale meat in dishwasher fluid through planned obsolescence to good old lying about specs and working hard to silence disgruntled customers. Frankly, I sometimes wonder why I still trust anyone but people I know personally. I'd like to say that it's because of education, because I can evaluate claims critically. But it's bullshit - a dedicated liar will run circles around everyone but the few smartest people. The truth is, I'm talking a calculated risk every day. And so are the anti-vaxxers. They end up hurting people. But that's not because they're evil or stupid. It's because they've broken under the avalanche of lies.
- dev1n 11y ago
  privacy is of the utmost importance to prevent the degradation of what makes us human; free will. If Fred goes to a certain three websites fairly regularly, and Joe (a bad guy, thug, gangster, terrorist) also goes to those three websites fairly regularly, some other authority monitoring Fred's traffic could say,"Hey, this Fred guy is following the same patterns as this other bad guy Joe, so we should probably intercept this guy and tell him we're worried he will fall into the same trap as bad guy Joe."
  - miguelrochefort 11y ago
    So Fred should hide because some powerful entity could draw invalid conclusions about him? Who let this powerful entity exist in the first place?
- Avshalom 11y ago
  On one hand: no fuck you I want to pee in solitude. On the other hand: I can't remember the title/author but there has absolutely been the argument floating around for a while that the problem isn't the lack of privacy it's the asymmetry of power combined with asymmetry of privacy.
- hackuser 11y ago
  You are of course welcome to your preferences and opinion, but shouldn't others also be able to make their own choice that they want privacy? Certainly many feel that way. I've tried to put together a smartphone that simply gives me the choice: Control over my own data. It seems nearly impossible without a large investment.
  - miguelrochefort 11y ago
    No. It's not up to you. You have no right (or at least shouldn't) to expect me from ignoring or forgetting any data whatsoever. You can't just come to me and ask me to forget that you crossed the street. You can't ask me to forget what I just heard. For some reasons, you people seem to think that you have exclusive rights over any information that involves you. In a way, it's just like the music industry trying to stop people from accessing their content through PIPA/SOPA. You're supporting censorship. You're destroying my freedom to information. On the other hand, you hurt yourself the most. You don't seem to realize that you're rejecting all social interactions that lead us where we are today. You'd rather live alone in the mountains, isolated from evil people like me that want to capture your information. You fund Kickstarter campaigns that build devices and network that willingly gets rid of everything that makes them valuable. And you don't even realize that's a problem. What I see is a group of people that are scared. Afraid to take risks. You pick the blue pill, hoping to reduce potential losses while completely ignoring all of the gains the red pill would make possible. I can't blame you, loss aversion is a bitch that drives you blind.
    - tremon 11y ago
      > No. It's not up to you. You have no right (or at least shouldn't) to expect me from ignoring or forgetting any data whatsoever But should I have the right not to tell you about myself? For that matter, do you have the right not to tell me your credit card number and expiration date?
      - miguelrochefort 11y ago
        Of course you have the right not to tell me something. I'm not advocating coercion, quite the opposite.
- forgottenpass 11y ago
  What if the actual problem is that we build systems and processes that rely on the unsustainable idea of privacy and the wishful ability to keep secrets? Do people not see that this makes everything more fragile and likely to break? I think you have that backwards. Privacy is a protection from the massive amount of failure states otherwise present in systems by refusing them information to operate on. Can we build systems and processes that can protect that information from all known incentives and motivations (both commercial and socially driven). And accommodate for all unforeseen ones, in a society that already doesn't have a single set of harmonious goals?
  - nunyabuizness 11y ago
    > Privacy is a protection from the massive amount of failure states otherwise present in systems by refusing them information to operate on. Then that means he has it right and you might have it backwards: the problems are the massive amount of failure states for which privacy is a protection.
    - teddyh 11y ago
      Unless someone proposes a solution to the “massive amount of failure states”, I am going to continue to assume that privacy is a necessary protection from them.
      - nunyabuizness 11y ago
        Direct democracy, free markets for law, representative democracy, voluntarism, etc. There are innumerable solutions to the emergent failure states of our legal system and as I stated elsewhere in this thread, if you declare privacy a greater need than better law, law-making and law-enforcement, you've already lost.
        onion2k 11y ago
        Let's assume for a moment that we can create a society with the most perfect law-making government, and that all laws are now perfect, and they're perfectly enforced. Would people still want privacy? I believe that the answer is yes. Simply because there will always be the fear that things may change. You only need one imperfect law or law enforcer and you need privacy to protect you. There will never be a point where we can give up privacy, even if everything else is perfect. Also, arguably, if there were perfect laws then the fact people have privacy or don't have privacy would make no difference so we might as well have it.
- Archio 11y ago
  > The real question is, what can we do to make living a transparent and open life possible Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but are you advocating for people to make as many details of their life open and transparent on the internet because we should have nothing to hide?
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - nunyabuizness 11y ago
    I think he's proposing that it's not privacy that's the problem, but society's laws and morality that require us to use privacy to protect ourselves. If no one had to be punished under unjust laws for living a decent life transparently, why would privacy be beneficial?
    - asntbqjkwbaoeuc 11y ago
      Under your scheme, do workers in the military enjoy privacy while they work? If they don't how do you protect the citizens? If they do---and if they are the only people who enjoy privacy in your land of forced transparency---how does this not stabilize to a military dictatorship?
      - miguelrochefort 11y ago
        Why would workers in the military enjoy privacy while they work?
  - miguelrochefort 11y ago
    Yes. I'm advocating for people to make as many details of their life open and transparent on the Internet. Unfortunately, society is currently built in a way that coerces me into keeping secrets (i.e., private key encryption, credit card number, ridiculous laws everybody breaks because privacy makes it easy to conceal). I would much rather live in a society that's built in a way that I can be honest about myself and not lose everything in exchange. There is no debate that one needs to keep some secrets in today's society, but unlike most of you I believe this to be a necessary evil due to the current nature of the system, not something we should strive for in the long term by making privacy more accessible.
- deleted 11y ago
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- sbov 11y ago
  Privacy is important because people are assholes. My wife has an ex-boyfriend who went to prison. She was pretty terrified when there was an internet trail to our current home address (which I have since closed). Largely because of our Macy's wedding registry which showed up when you searched her name, which had my name, and there's only one of me in the US. We know he found the registry because he emailed her about it. But he had to be a bit technical to connect the rest of the dots, and I don't think he did.
  - miguelrochefort 11y ago
    Do you seriously believe that we can (or should) reach a point where nobody can be identified or located? Instead of getting rid of the bad guys (or preferably get rid of incentives that motivate actions you don't agree with), you seem to be suggesting that we should hide from them. I can imagine this would lead to a world with more bad guys (because no effort exists in preventing them), a lucky minority of people who have the skills to remain hidden/unidentified (not mentionning the constant worry and utilitarian trade-offs) while letting those who don't have this chance be vulnerable to this threat. What I hear is "let's keep marijuana consumption illegal, as long as it's easy for my fortunate white self not to get caught smoking it". No wonder so many visible minorities go to jail for crimes that white people commit just as often, ethnicity is hard to conceal. I have yet to see a movement helping black people look white so that society treats them more fairly.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      > Do you seriously believe that we can (or should) reach a point where nobody can be identified or located? People believing such a thing probably don't understand the fundamental nature of reality. Everything forms a web of causality; all your actions spread outwards at the speed of light, affecting everything else around you. Quite often one can correlate back those effects to their original cause. This is what science does - figuring out new ways to correlate observations with their causes. Progress of technology only means we're getting better at it. I don't see how you can revert back to the pre-industrial levels of privacy without rolling back the industrial revolution.
    - 11y ago
- nunyabuizness 11y ago
  I wish I could upvote this more. One reply mentions how easy anti-sodomy laws would be to enforce if we had no privacy. Considering how much faith people put in democracy and the democratic process, you'd think that people would concede that it's the law and our influence over it that's the problem, not privacy. One question I like to propose to those who disagree with this sentiment is as follows: Imagine you live in a hypothetical world where all things you consider moral, just and socially acceptable were legal and societally acceptable and where everything else was illegal and societally reprehensible. What role would privacy play in such a society? What benefits would it provide? I have yet to get a good answer to that question; if peeing in public was ok with me, everyone else and perfectly legal, what reason would I have not to do it? (You can mention shaming and whatnot, but I posit that in this hypothetical world based on my morality, if I didn't shame people, no one else would either). tl;dr: the problem isn't privacy, the problem is law and our inability to influence it, for which our best tool for the problems that arise from our lack of influence is privacy.
  - teddyh 11y ago
    If we assume that laws can never be perfect, it is obvious why perfect enforcement of laws can never be a completely good thing. Not to mention corrupt officials, selective enforcement, etc.
    - nunyabuizness 11y ago
      Again, corrupt officials, selective enforcement, etc are the problems, not lack privacy. There are a number of ways to make the nature of law better (free markets for law, direct democracy, actual representative democracy, etc), which would all render the need for as much privacy as people are advocating moot. The minute you declare privacy enforcement a greater problem than fair law-making and fair law enforcement, you've started a losing game for which the oppressors (the ones you're using privacy as a defense against) have already won.
  - nmjohn 11y ago
    > Imagine you live in a hypothetical world where all things you consider moral, just and socially acceptable were legal and societally acceptable and where everything else was illegal and societally reprehensible. What role would privacy play in such a society? What benefits would it provide? Sure, that hypothetical would be great for _you_ (you being the decider of morality) - but what about everyone else living in the world? It is fundamentally impossible for a world to exist where your hypothetical can be true for everyone. Consider this - the hypothetical you describe is currently true for some set of people. And yet it ruins lives and causes misery for millions of others.
- teddyh 11y ago
  Read The Eternal Value of Privacy by Bruce Schneier: http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2006/05/70886 http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securi...
  - nunyabuizness 11y ago
    Everything he states in that article points to privacy being a defense against unchecked power, for which the simplest long-term solution is check the power, not admit defeat to unchecked power and shore up your defenses.
    - wfo 11y ago
      'Check the power' is a naive and impossible solution that has been attempted by essentially every human civilization since the dawn of time and has never, ever worked. Sometimes you just need to recognize truth when it smashes you in the face again and again over thousands of years and accept that we need some way to deal with it. Also are you really advocating only one line of defense against unchecked power? "Just trust that people with power won't abuse it" isn't good enough and it's never going to be, but that's what you're advocating.
rayiner 11y ago
> It is really a generational effect. People in law school learned this way of thinking 10 years ago, and they are coming into their place in the regulatory space. As someone in that group, I don't know if I see any evidence of this generational effect. The Internet is just the latest battleground for ideologies that have always existed: consumer protection, national security, business freedom, market solutions. The same sort of thinking guides the people who call for backdoors now, who called for banning encryption in the 1990's, who called for easier access to credit card and other transactions in the 1970's, etc. Businesses that create technological products are always going to be entities the government can control. And regulators will never be encryption utopians. They'll always be mild pragmatists willing to make compromises whose values fall moderately left or right of center on the authoritarian scale.
- mindslight 11y ago
  Politicians/regulators can never be encryption utopians because they always seek more power. However, widespread adoption of secure encryption [0] could turn proposals to ban it from being seriously "debated", to the equivalent of that state senator who wanted to legislate pi = 3. "Physics drives finance drives politics", and all that. [0] Obviously without centralized database MITM, using software not distributed by a centralized entity that can be easily controlled as you point out.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    It's not even a matter of "politicians wanting more power." The public wants the government to have power over people, because they are (reasonably or not), more scared of other people than they are of the government. People fall on different places on the spectrum for how they weigh the loss of privacy versus the need for security, but very few are willing to say "we need pervasive unbreakable encryption, whatever the consequences to law enforcement." Even terrorism aside, very few people are willing to give up the power of authorities to investigate, say, the transactions of suspected financial criminals.
    - mindslight 11y ago
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zby 11y ago
That Enigma project that he bases his opinion on looks rather suspicious for me. Here is their white-paper: http://enigma.media.mit.edu/enigma_full.pdf http://enigma.media.mit.edu/enigma_full.pdf I am a bit skeptical on anything with blockchain in the synopsis these days.
Create 11y ago
[Moglen] said "You mean The United States government is, from now on, going to keep a list of everybody every American knows. Do you think by any chance that should require a law?" And he just laugh because they did it in a press release in the middle of the night on Wednesday when it was raining https://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-thought-requires-free-media https://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-...
mark_l_watson 11y ago
I think that Lessig has it right: people will not fight for privacy if privacy inconveniences them too much. I jump through hoops to get some small level of privacy and still enjoy web properties that track users. A little off topic, but I think it is time for the USA to do a "let's go to the moon" type effort to make digital systems secure and protect privacy. I know this is a long shot though: it would take re-purposing the capabilities of the NSA (and the FBI, etc.) to making digital communication secure. Obviously this requires NO BACK DOORS, and more research into digital security. There are a lot of smart people working at the NSA and it would be good to have them working on helpful tasks like securing the Internet for businesses, the government, and individuals - and not waste time on spying on innocent people. In the 1990s the NSA and FBI did a lot of good work in this direction, but then the bogus 'war on terror' pushed them off course.

57 points by oznathan 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

None of these articles explain why privacy is a good thing. They just assume it to be a fact. I have some issues with this. What if the entire premise of privacy being beneficial is flawed? What if the actual problem is that we build systems and processes that rely on the unsustainable idea of privacy and the wishful ability to keep secrets? Do people not see that this makes everything more fragile and likely to break? I don't want more regulations for startups that want to analyze my genome, nor do I want to become an expert in internet security just to browse the web. Writing software is already difficult as it is, and the requirement to protect privacy makes it even more difficult and risky. The real question is, what can we do to make living a transparent and open life possible.

jpollock 11y ago
Humans lie all the time. We lie to each other, we lie to the government. We cheat, break rules and break laws all the time. Societies rely on privacy to limit the intrusion of others into our lives. It becomes really easy to avoid enforcing a law when you can't see it happening. For example, without privacy, sodomy laws become much easier to enforce. No longer would it be 2 closeted gay men living together happily, it would be acceptable for the government to setup a mobile array and detect that the two men were sharing a single bed, and then charge them with sodomy. Another example. In New Zealand, prostitution is legal. However, income information and receipts are private between the business and the tax department. Visiting a prostitute is generally frowned upon publicly. So, what happens when all prostitutes are "outed", and their customer lists published? Is that a good thing? Is it just another way of making the job illegal again, with all of the societal ills that making it legal was intended to avoid? For a US example, imagine publishing the health records from Planned Parenthood clinics - any and all. Venereal disease, birth control, abortion, anything. I don't see how we can prevent intrusion of individuals and governments into private areas of life without a definition and expectation of privacy. Particularly when there are differing opinions on morality and what the government should do to enforce it.
- miguelrochefort 11y ago
  Are you arguing that it's my responsibility to be careful and discrete when I commit crimes that should be legal in the first place? If both murder and sodomy are illegal to the eyes of the government, then wouldn't more accessible privacy protect both murderers and sodomists? Clearly, the issues in the examples you describe are with the expectations of the government and its citizens. I don't want to ever have to lie about things I'm not ashamed of, and neither do I want to be ashamed of things I do. Society's foundation is Trust, and Trust starts with Honesty. We want everyone to be as honest as possible, and we should therefore change the system to motivate honesty. Only then will we have a clear picture of reality, human nature, and problems we ought to fix. I want lying to be considered as the worst crime. I want a currency that's built on trust. I want every commitment and promises to be tracked and evaluated. I want fairness, and it starts with understanding reality. We lie so much that we can't imagine a world without a right to it.
  - tremon 11y ago
    > Clearly, the issues in the examples you describe are with the expectations of the government and its citizens. I don't want to ever have to lie about things I'm not ashamed of That's wonderfully magnanimous of you. But do you think it's reasonable to expect all your fellow citizens to hold that same conviction? Just because you value things that way, doesn't make it applicable to everyone. What I hear you saying is that if everyone would just conform to your worldview, you'd have a much easier time living in it. Or do you think that your view is universal already? Also, privacy isn't a citizen vs government thing. Privacy is an expression of the power that every individual holds in every interpersonal relationship: the choice to share with or withhold information from another. And that is a personal choice. Ideologies like "you should not judge" are at least as old as the Bible, yet we still haven't overcome it. In fact, judging from most Twitter stories I hear of (or 4chan/reddit subcultures), I'd say we have seriously regressed as a society in that matter. Please have a solution for solving hate campaigns and other forms of harassment first, before suggesting that we remove discretionary power from every individual.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > I want lying to be considered as the worst crime. I want a currency that's built on trust. I want every commitment and promises to be tracked and evaluated. I want fairness, and it starts with understanding reality. Hell yes. I too want people to start treating lying with seriousness it deserves. Lying, lying, lying. It's the thing that rots and destroys our societies. I too keep repeating that civilization starts and ends with trust. Trust people have in the system, towards their leaders, and towards each other. The less trust people have, the more defensive they get, more stupid things they do, and the less efficient everything becomes. A perfect example is the growth of various anti-science movements, anti-vaccination being a prominent case. Where do you think it comes from? Many like to say that anti-vaxxers are simply stupid, can't comprehend biology or are motivated reasoners. But the reality is simpler, and you can see it by just observing them carefully. They are normal people, like everyone else. They want to be healthy and happy. They want their children to be healthy and happy. The only real difference is that they had their trust in authority broken on a serious level. They don't trust doctors, scientific consensus and government health organizations. Is this surprising? Frankly, no. Because all of those authorities lie. They lie fucking big, and then they lie small. Not a day goes by when we don't hear about corrupt politicians, when we don't see bullshit papers published in respected journals, when we don't learn a drug is a scam, or plain dangerous. Governments lie, and so do businesses, big and small. They lie in ads, they cheat in stores, they sell us crap - from grocery store washing stale meat in dishwasher fluid through planned obsolescence to good old lying about specs and working hard to silence disgruntled customers. Frankly, I sometimes wonder why I still trust anyone but people I know personally. I'd like to say that it's because of education, because I can evaluate claims critically. But it's bullshit - a dedicated liar will run circles around everyone but the few smartest people. The truth is, I'm talking a calculated risk every day. And so are the anti-vaxxers. They end up hurting people. But that's not because they're evil or stupid. It's because they've broken under the avalanche of lies.
dev1n 11y ago
privacy is of the utmost importance to prevent the degradation of what makes us human; free will. If Fred goes to a certain three websites fairly regularly, and Joe (a bad guy, thug, gangster, terrorist) also goes to those three websites fairly regularly, some other authority monitoring Fred's traffic could say,"Hey, this Fred guy is following the same patterns as this other bad guy Joe, so we should probably intercept this guy and tell him we're worried he will fall into the same trap as bad guy Joe."
- miguelrochefort 11y ago
  So Fred should hide because some powerful entity could draw invalid conclusions about him? Who let this powerful entity exist in the first place?
Avshalom 11y ago
On one hand: no fuck you I want to pee in solitude. On the other hand: I can't remember the title/author but there has absolutely been the argument floating around for a while that the problem isn't the lack of privacy it's the asymmetry of power combined with asymmetry of privacy.
hackuser 11y ago
You are of course welcome to your preferences and opinion, but shouldn't others also be able to make their own choice that they want privacy? Certainly many feel that way. I've tried to put together a smartphone that simply gives me the choice: Control over my own data. It seems nearly impossible without a large investment.
- miguelrochefort 11y ago
  No. It's not up to you. You have no right (or at least shouldn't) to expect me from ignoring or forgetting any data whatsoever. You can't just come to me and ask me to forget that you crossed the street. You can't ask me to forget what I just heard. For some reasons, you people seem to think that you have exclusive rights over any information that involves you. In a way, it's just like the music industry trying to stop people from accessing their content through PIPA/SOPA. You're supporting censorship. You're destroying my freedom to information. On the other hand, you hurt yourself the most. You don't seem to realize that you're rejecting all social interactions that lead us where we are today. You'd rather live alone in the mountains, isolated from evil people like me that want to capture your information. You fund Kickstarter campaigns that build devices and network that willingly gets rid of everything that makes them valuable. And you don't even realize that's a problem. What I see is a group of people that are scared. Afraid to take risks. You pick the blue pill, hoping to reduce potential losses while completely ignoring all of the gains the red pill would make possible. I can't blame you, loss aversion is a bitch that drives you blind.
  - tremon 11y ago
    > No. It's not up to you. You have no right (or at least shouldn't) to expect me from ignoring or forgetting any data whatsoever But should I have the right not to tell you about myself? For that matter, do you have the right not to tell me your credit card number and expiration date?
    - miguelrochefort 11y ago
      Of course you have the right not to tell me something. I'm not advocating coercion, quite the opposite.
forgottenpass 11y ago
What if the actual problem is that we build systems and processes that rely on the unsustainable idea of privacy and the wishful ability to keep secrets? Do people not see that this makes everything more fragile and likely to break? I think you have that backwards. Privacy is a protection from the massive amount of failure states otherwise present in systems by refusing them information to operate on. Can we build systems and processes that can protect that information from all known incentives and motivations (both commercial and socially driven). And accommodate for all unforeseen ones, in a society that already doesn't have a single set of harmonious goals?
- nunyabuizness 11y ago
  > Privacy is a protection from the massive amount of failure states otherwise present in systems by refusing them information to operate on. Then that means he has it right and you might have it backwards: the problems are the massive amount of failure states for which privacy is a protection.
  - teddyh 11y ago
    Unless someone proposes a solution to the “massive amount of failure states”, I am going to continue to assume that privacy is a necessary protection from them.
    - nunyabuizness 11y ago
      Direct democracy, free markets for law, representative democracy, voluntarism, etc. There are innumerable solutions to the emergent failure states of our legal system and as I stated elsewhere in this thread, if you declare privacy a greater need than better law, law-making and law-enforcement, you've already lost.
      - onion2k 11y ago
        Let's assume for a moment that we can create a society with the most perfect law-making government, and that all laws are now perfect, and they're perfectly enforced. Would people still want privacy? I believe that the answer is yes. Simply because there will always be the fear that things may change. You only need one imperfect law or law enforcer and you need privacy to protect you. There will never be a point where we can give up privacy, even if everything else is perfect. Also, arguably, if there were perfect laws then the fact people have privacy or don't have privacy would make no difference so we might as well have it.
Archio 11y ago
> The real question is, what can we do to make living a transparent and open life possible Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but are you advocating for people to make as many details of their life open and transparent on the internet because we should have nothing to hide?
- deleted 11y ago
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- nunyabuizness 11y ago
  I think he's proposing that it's not privacy that's the problem, but society's laws and morality that require us to use privacy to protect ourselves. If no one had to be punished under unjust laws for living a decent life transparently, why would privacy be beneficial?
  - asntbqjkwbaoeuc 11y ago
    Under your scheme, do workers in the military enjoy privacy while they work? If they don't how do you protect the citizens? If they do---and if they are the only people who enjoy privacy in your land of forced transparency---how does this not stabilize to a military dictatorship?
    - miguelrochefort 11y ago
      Why would workers in the military enjoy privacy while they work?
- miguelrochefort 11y ago
  Yes. I'm advocating for people to make as many details of their life open and transparent on the Internet. Unfortunately, society is currently built in a way that coerces me into keeping secrets (i.e., private key encryption, credit card number, ridiculous laws everybody breaks because privacy makes it easy to conceal). I would much rather live in a society that's built in a way that I can be honest about myself and not lose everything in exchange. There is no debate that one needs to keep some secrets in today's society, but unlike most of you I believe this to be a necessary evil due to the current nature of the system, not something we should strive for in the long term by making privacy more accessible.
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sbov 11y ago
Privacy is important because people are assholes. My wife has an ex-boyfriend who went to prison. She was pretty terrified when there was an internet trail to our current home address (which I have since closed). Largely because of our Macy's wedding registry which showed up when you searched her name, which had my name, and there's only one of me in the US. We know he found the registry because he emailed her about it. But he had to be a bit technical to connect the rest of the dots, and I don't think he did.
- miguelrochefort 11y ago
  Do you seriously believe that we can (or should) reach a point where nobody can be identified or located? Instead of getting rid of the bad guys (or preferably get rid of incentives that motivate actions you don't agree with), you seem to be suggesting that we should hide from them. I can imagine this would lead to a world with more bad guys (because no effort exists in preventing them), a lucky minority of people who have the skills to remain hidden/unidentified (not mentionning the constant worry and utilitarian trade-offs) while letting those who don't have this chance be vulnerable to this threat. What I hear is "let's keep marijuana consumption illegal, as long as it's easy for my fortunate white self not to get caught smoking it". No wonder so many visible minorities go to jail for crimes that white people commit just as often, ethnicity is hard to conceal. I have yet to see a movement helping black people look white so that society treats them more fairly.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > Do you seriously believe that we can (or should) reach a point where nobody can be identified or located? People believing such a thing probably don't understand the fundamental nature of reality. Everything forms a web of causality; all your actions spread outwards at the speed of light, affecting everything else around you. Quite often one can correlate back those effects to their original cause. This is what science does - figuring out new ways to correlate observations with their causes. Progress of technology only means we're getting better at it. I don't see how you can revert back to the pre-industrial levels of privacy without rolling back the industrial revolution.
  - 11y ago
nunyabuizness 11y ago
I wish I could upvote this more. One reply mentions how easy anti-sodomy laws would be to enforce if we had no privacy. Considering how much faith people put in democracy and the democratic process, you'd think that people would concede that it's the law and our influence over it that's the problem, not privacy. One question I like to propose to those who disagree with this sentiment is as follows: Imagine you live in a hypothetical world where all things you consider moral, just and socially acceptable were legal and societally acceptable and where everything else was illegal and societally reprehensible. What role would privacy play in such a society? What benefits would it provide? I have yet to get a good answer to that question; if peeing in public was ok with me, everyone else and perfectly legal, what reason would I have not to do it? (You can mention shaming and whatnot, but I posit that in this hypothetical world based on my morality, if I didn't shame people, no one else would either). tl;dr: the problem isn't privacy, the problem is law and our inability to influence it, for which our best tool for the problems that arise from our lack of influence is privacy.
- teddyh 11y ago
  If we assume that laws can never be perfect, it is obvious why perfect enforcement of laws can never be a completely good thing. Not to mention corrupt officials, selective enforcement, etc.
  - nunyabuizness 11y ago
    Again, corrupt officials, selective enforcement, etc are the problems, not lack privacy. There are a number of ways to make the nature of law better (free markets for law, direct democracy, actual representative democracy, etc), which would all render the need for as much privacy as people are advocating moot. The minute you declare privacy enforcement a greater problem than fair law-making and fair law enforcement, you've started a losing game for which the oppressors (the ones you're using privacy as a defense against) have already won.
- nmjohn 11y ago
  > Imagine you live in a hypothetical world where all things you consider moral, just and socially acceptable were legal and societally acceptable and where everything else was illegal and societally reprehensible. What role would privacy play in such a society? What benefits would it provide? Sure, that hypothetical would be great for _you_ (you being the decider of morality) - but what about everyone else living in the world? It is fundamentally impossible for a world to exist where your hypothetical can be true for everyone. Consider this - the hypothetical you describe is currently true for some set of people. And yet it ruins lives and causes misery for millions of others.
teddyh 11y ago
Read The Eternal Value of Privacy by Bruce Schneier: http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2006/05/70886 http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securi...
- nunyabuizness 11y ago
  Everything he states in that article points to privacy being a defense against unchecked power, for which the simplest long-term solution is check the power, not admit defeat to unchecked power and shore up your defenses.
  - wfo 11y ago
    'Check the power' is a naive and impossible solution that has been attempted by essentially every human civilization since the dawn of time and has never, ever worked. Sometimes you just need to recognize truth when it smashes you in the face again and again over thousands of years and accept that we need some way to deal with it. Also are you really advocating only one line of defense against unchecked power? "Just trust that people with power won't abuse it" isn't good enough and it's never going to be, but that's what you're advocating.

rayiner 11y ago

> It is really a generational effect. People in law school learned this way of thinking 10 years ago, and they are coming into their place in the regulatory space. As someone in that group, I don't know if I see any evidence of this generational effect. The Internet is just the latest battleground for ideologies that have always existed: consumer protection, national security, business freedom, market solutions. The same sort of thinking guides the people who call for backdoors now, who called for banning encryption in the 1990's, who called for easier access to credit card and other transactions in the 1970's, etc. Businesses that create technological products are always going to be entities the government can control. And regulators will never be encryption utopians. They'll always be mild pragmatists willing to make compromises whose values fall moderately left or right of center on the authoritarian scale.

mindslight 11y ago
Politicians/regulators can never be encryption utopians because they always seek more power. However, widespread adoption of secure encryption [0] could turn proposals to ban it from being seriously "debated", to the equivalent of that state senator who wanted to legislate pi = 3. "Physics drives finance drives politics", and all that. [0] Obviously without centralized database MITM, using software not distributed by a centralized entity that can be easily controlled as you point out.
- rayiner 11y ago
  It's not even a matter of "politicians wanting more power." The public wants the government to have power over people, because they are (reasonably or not), more scared of other people than they are of the government. People fall on different places on the spectrum for how they weigh the loss of privacy versus the need for security, but very few are willing to say "we need pervasive unbreakable encryption, whatever the consequences to law enforcement." Even terrorism aside, very few people are willing to give up the power of authorities to investigate, say, the transactions of suspected financial criminals.
  - mindslight 11y ago

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zby 11y ago

That Enigma project that he bases his opinion on looks rather suspicious for me. Here is their white-paper: http://enigma.media.mit.edu/enigma_full.pdf http://enigma.media.mit.edu/enigma_full.pdf I am a bit skeptical on anything with blockchain in the synopsis these days.

Create 11y ago

[Moglen] said "You mean The United States government is, from now on, going to keep a list of everybody every American knows. Do you think by any chance that should require a law?" And he just laugh because they did it in a press release in the middle of the night on Wednesday when it was raining https://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-thought-requires-free-media https://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-...

mark_l_watson 11y ago

I think that Lessig has it right: people will not fight for privacy if privacy inconveniences them too much. I jump through hoops to get some small level of privacy and still enjoy web properties that track users. A little off topic, but I think it is time for the USA to do a "let's go to the moon" type effort to make digital systems secure and protect privacy. I know this is a long shot though: it would take re-purposing the capabilities of the NSA (and the FBI, etc.) to making digital communication secure. Obviously this requires NO BACK DOORS, and more research into digital security. There are a lot of smart people working at the NSA and it would be good to have them working on helpful tasks like securing the Internet for businesses, the government, and individuals - and not waste time on spying on innocent people. In the 1990s the NSA and FBI did a lot of good work in this direction, but then the bogus 'war on terror' pushed them off course.