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"Democracy works because we assume that communication can be done freely and anonymously. If these assumptions don't hold true for major communication platforms
by rmrm 15y ago
"Democracy works because we assume that communication can be done freely and anonymously. If these assumptions don't hold true for major communication platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Google+ we do have a significant problem."
Face to face communication has always been available freely and anonymously. I'm not quite certain that any other form of communication has ever been either freely available or remotely anonymous for anyone remotely like an average person.
What communications platform has it ever held true for?
1.) Telegraph -- cost money, not universally accessible, open, message assured to be read by at least 2 3rd parties.
2.) Mail -- costs money, need a registered address, handled by a quasi govt agency, can be read by 3rd party.
3.) Land line Telephone -- costs money, not universally accessible, requires registered address, every action is logged including recipient and duration. Calls can be listened to by 3rd party.
4.) Cell Phones -- costs money, not universally accessible, burner can be had with no address or name. Calls can be listened to by 3rd party. Location tracking available.
5.) Home Internet -- costs money, not universally accessible, requires registered address, everything routed through ISP who keeps user logs, network that can intercept.
It's unclear to me why the service layer attracts so much attention, when the underlying network layer currently makes it largely impossible to have what you want for the average person. Having anonymity at the service layer is almost confusing when the underlying framework guarantees it is largely not real. There are all sorts of options already available at the service layer that can give all sorts of false appearances, many fewer at the network layer to make those false appearances turn real. Twitter and Facebook and G+ are trivial issues in comparison to getting around the fact that backbone and access points are a network owned by 3rd party intermediaries (just as with all the previous communications platforms above).
- kb101 15y agoWhile all the above points are true, there is a big difference between picking up the phone to call someone in 1950 and posting an update on a social networking site in 2011. I would submit that there are two factors that make the difference: 1) laws regulating the service in question and 2) ease of data aggregation / mining. In both cases there are barriers to interception & analysis of communication that effectively provide or used to provide a certain level of expected privacy and anonymity. Of course no communication is 100% secure and of course anything can be intercepted, but how hard is that to do? In 1950 if you wanted to get pictures of someone's house, learn the names of their known associates, find out what books they own, what magazines they read, what opinions they have, their work history, their goals, their aspirations, which of their relatives they are closest to, etc. etc. -- your work would have been cut out for you. It would involve physical trips to places like courthouses, time and effort in taking pictures, developing film, driving around, possibly snooping where you shouldn't, asking lots of people lots of questions, and so on. Now all that is out there with a few mouse clicks and not only is that the case, it is rapidly becoming the social norm that it should be out there and if it isn't, as Mr. Schmidt says, then you must have something to hide. The genie of cheap, accessible, centralized data storage and data mining is out of the bottle. At least with email there is some sort of legal precedent to treat communications as privileged. With social networks and the like, users give up their rights to the commercial entity that provides the service. And as others have pointed out, rolling your own services is not an attractive alternative. Agreed, the network layer can be intercepted, but the network layer either has to be hacked into or somebody in law enforcement has to leave a data trail regarding the interception. At the service layer, it is becoming assumed that you give up all rights to your data, and this is something whose repercussions have yet to be fully felt.