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Semantics distract from the point at hand. There's no privacy when you leave your house either, but you still expect people (including school administrators) no

Semantics distract from the point at hand. There's no privacy when you leave your house either, but you still expect people (including school administrators) not to follow you around recording your actions and statements. There is a reasonable expectation to /not be stalked/ even when conducting yourself in an otherwise public setting. Calling this "privacy" is a loose application of the word, but we never really had the need to come up with another one before the information age made it economical to do this to everyone all the time.

treis 7y ago
Why are you posting things publicly on the internet if not for other people to read them? If that's the case, what does it matter if a member of the public ends up reading it based on some filter? That's the difference compared with someone stalking a person. We don't generally go out into public to allow others to follow us.
- homonculus1 7y ago
  And I don't generally post things publicly to allow an anonymous authority figure to compare every one of my statements against some hidden criteria of "acceptability", one which is highly likely to be skewed toward preserving the power of the person implementing it. "A member of the public ends up reading it" is reductionist. The two are more or less technically interchangeable due to the cheapness of digital monitoring, but if you think that's all that matters you're completely missing the point: the issue that you're ignoring is how this is done systematically and with a particular intent. It is not like overhearing a conversation in the park, it like is hiding in the bushes with a tape recorder. Total observation is socially and politically horrifying, but authoritarians like to take advantage of the fact that we never previously codified norms against it because it was resource prohibitive until the advent of computing.
  - treis 7y ago
    >It is not like overhearing a conversation in the park, it like is hiding in the bushes with a tape recorder. It's not like that because people have a reasonable expectation that what they say in a conversation will only be heard by those in that conversation. Tweeting is the real life equivalent of standing on the table and shouting something with a bullhorn. There's no expectation of privacy there. >Total observation is socially and politically horrifying It's not "total observation". It's observation of things they explicitly choice to make public.
    - homonculus1 7y ago
      Once again, there are degrees. When addressing an open audience there is an expectation to be heard by other human beings in a social context; but neither is this an invitation to have one's thoughts algorithmically scraped and profiled and flagged for assessment by a bureaucrat somewhere. Please try to consider this in relation to the goals of natural interpersonal communication, and not under the assumption that everything legal is proper.

treis 7y ago

Why are you posting things publicly on the internet if not for other people to read them? If that's the case, what does it matter if a member of the public ends up reading it based on some filter? That's the difference compared with someone stalking a person. We don't generally go out into public to allow others to follow us.

homonculus1 7y ago
And I don't generally post things publicly to allow an anonymous authority figure to compare every one of my statements against some hidden criteria of "acceptability", one which is highly likely to be skewed toward preserving the power of the person implementing it. "A member of the public ends up reading it" is reductionist. The two are more or less technically interchangeable due to the cheapness of digital monitoring, but if you think that's all that matters you're completely missing the point: the issue that you're ignoring is how this is done systematically and with a particular intent. It is not like overhearing a conversation in the park, it like is hiding in the bushes with a tape recorder. Total observation is socially and politically horrifying, but authoritarians like to take advantage of the fact that we never previously codified norms against it because it was resource prohibitive until the advent of computing.
- treis 7y ago
  >It is not like overhearing a conversation in the park, it like is hiding in the bushes with a tape recorder. It's not like that because people have a reasonable expectation that what they say in a conversation will only be heard by those in that conversation. Tweeting is the real life equivalent of standing on the table and shouting something with a bullhorn. There's no expectation of privacy there. >Total observation is socially and politically horrifying It's not "total observation". It's observation of things they explicitly choice to make public.
  - homonculus1 7y ago
    Once again, there are degrees. When addressing an open audience there is an expectation to be heard by other human beings in a social context; but neither is this an invitation to have one's thoughts algorithmically scraped and profiled and flagged for assessment by a bureaucrat somewhere. Please try to consider this in relation to the goals of natural interpersonal communication, and not under the assumption that everything legal is proper.