9 ms·

I’ve been sitting here for a while trying to come up with how to eloquently put this in English and I cannot. Maybe English lacks the appropriate terminology to

by hug 3y ago

I’ve been sitting here for a while trying to come up with how to eloquently put this in English and I cannot. Maybe English lacks the appropriate terminology to express the difference between privacy and publicity within the expanded scope of current technology. It’s my only language, and I like to think I’m pretty good at it, but I’m absolutely stumped as to how you’d exactly word exactly what you’re not understanding. I feel like it’s a case of the language we speak shaping our interpretation of what is just, and doing so in such a way that it’s hard to even explain what we’re now missing. The problem, in so many words, is that these days the act of being in public is public. That’s a weird sentence to write, and I’m not sure how else to put it. Previously, the memory of any public act was restricted to those who were there to observe it at the time. Any acts in public were by themselves public. Acts in private were private. There was a third quasi-state: anonymous isn’t the right word, because you were always identifiable, but by happenstance you just weren’t. You were in public, but not publicised. Recognisable, but not recognised. Observable, but not observed. By definition though you were always in public, never in private. Modern technology has somewhat erased the third state by slowly but surely eroding the cases in which you are not observed, tracked, recorded, or identified, by some technology or another. It’s made public very public, if you excuse the unavoidable pleonasm. There’s no good word for the third state, that I can think of, and it makes me sad.

frankfrankfrank 3y ago
The challenge you have is not language related, but rather logic related. The issue our Swiss friend raises is valid, no matter the language. Do Americans not have an expectation of privacy even when talking in public, based on the expectations of the individuals engaged in speech? For example, when you are at a restaurant with friends, is there not an expectation of privacy within the context of your conversation with someone? Any reasonable person will have an expectation of privacy that will generally be limited to all those people around your table and with whom you will be making eye contact, as long as you are speaking at a tone that is reasonable for that context. No? Is the speaker going to be speaking so that everyone in the restaurant can understand their speech? No? So it’s not public then, right? Ignoring incidental overhearing, of course. Inversely, if we consider what the American system clearly considers private, the home and, by extension, the car; if you have ever heard a conversation through thin walls between apartments or maybe a phone conversation on car speaker blasted speakerphone, is that private then? … are Phone conversations then also not private since in most cases the caller will not likely be aware that their direct conversation partner is blasting their conversation to the parking lot on the car’s speaker phone? These scenarios, among others, beckon a requirement to make privacy expectations approaching unachievable. Is that reasonable? No, of course not. And that’s before we explore things like focused beam microphones that make all conversations within any line of sight or even just things you whisper into someone’s ear not radically private based on the current American nonsensical definition reasonable and privacy. The problem in America is not the speech part, but rather that the logic and reason itself has been inverted and perverted by sophists and abusive manipulators over the decades, which have turned everything upside down, including the definitions of “reasonable”, “public”, and “private”, i.e., the core logic of the matter. None of the founders of America and the writers of the Constitution would recognize any of these current assumptions built into definitive and even the words they wrote, let alone all the illogical and lazy cruft that has been added after the twelfth amendment. They would think we’ve gone insane, because were have our, more accurately, sophist psychological manipulators and abusers have driven us so insane that we engage in the horrid abominations and abuses that are normalized all around us today. It has long been an ever worsening entropy problem.
- gmane 3y ago
  Wait, why are you drawing the line at the 12th amendment and not the 16th?
- hug 3y ago
  To provide some clarity on my own position, I understand and echo your desire to have a society in which our quiet moments are not intruded upon. I am not arguing that the expectation that you not be monitored is unreasonable. What I am saying is that these feelings do not line up in a tidy way with the words “private” and “public”. In all versions of modern English that I’m aware of, “public” is an antonym of “private”. In all conversations around this topic, they are often treated as though they are not. There’s an intuition gap that you rely on your conversational partner to cross. What you do is say “I have a right to privacy, and by privacy I do not mean literally private, I mean incidentally non-public, due to circumstance”, only not in so many words. It’s the way I talk about it as well, because there’s no well understood and unambiguous way to describe what I just called “incidentally non-public”. Assuming, of course, that you accept that public and private are antonyms, you can demonstrate this intuition gap by instead of talking about public and private, using another pair of antonyms and talking about up and down, and instead ask the question: Does everyone have the right to be up while down? That’s obviously a terrible and nonsensical question, but I feel it is exactly what some people read when they encounter someone’s desire for privacy in public. How can you be private in public? How can you be up while down? This isn’t sophistry or maliciousness: it’s a real way that real people interpret the conversation. Failure to recognise the intuition gap is what leads to a failure to understand the other person you’re talking to.
  - godelski 3y ago
    If you're getting into the definition of public vs private you also need to consider what constitutes a reasonable expectation. Not just from our current reference frame of everyone having phones and every business having cameras, but from a few decades ago as well as a century, or more, ago. What may constitute a reasonable expectation today may be extremely divorced from that of when the laws were written. I love the nuance you are getting into, but I do think it needs to be taken at least one step further for a good conversation to take place. People are working with different assumptions and not communicating these well and results in very different versions of reasonable expectation. 50 years ago, even 20, it was pretty reasonable to assume that you could not, let along would not, be recorded unless you were involved in a large public demonstration. I think if we're getting down to public vs private that we should also consider this aspect. And I think we should recognize the difference between a private activity within a public space from a public activity within a public space. The ecosystem has changed and with it we must be a bit more nuanced.
Libcat99 3y ago
When you are in a physical space, you can look around you and somewhat reliably observe who can see you, hear you, and observe your actions. You've always then had the choice to base your actions and your speech on who will observe them, with the further knowledge that they might go on to share this with others. The difference isn't that what you do now can be shared. It's the ease of sharing and the fidelity with which it can be shared.
- godelski 3y ago
  I mostly agree, but there's part that you're missing. Ease is a critical issue, but the capacity to record was substantially different back then too, and thus the validity of what was being shared. There's a big difference in someone claiming you said something vs someone having a recording of it. 20 years ago everyone wasn't walking around with a camera and microphone in their pocket. It is not only the ease in sharing and identifying, but even the base capacity to perform the action in the first place. If you were being recorded on video in the past, you'd likely notice the bulky camcorder mounted on some guy's shoulder. (not even mentioning that resolution was very different and depth of field is not a negligible). 20 years ago you did not have a reasonable expectation to be recorded in the public physical space. This is contingent upon the probability of someone being able to perform an action, and even more so without you being aware of said action being performed. That wasn't that long ago...
  - Libcat99 3y ago
    That's what I was getting at with the fidelity attribute. Before you could observe an event and remember it (poorly) and share it (slowly) but technology, for better or worse, has greatly increased the possible fidelity of that memory, which can now shared endlessly without losing quality.
specialist 3y ago
Agreed. I also get flummoxed whenever I try to talk about this stuff. Further, I've only recently appreciated that our modern folk understanding of right to privacy has eclipsed its twin, the right to personal autonomy. The development of the doctrine regarding the tort of "invasion of privacy" was largely spurred by the Warren and Brandeis article, "The Right to Privacy". In it, they explain why they wrote the article in its introduction: "Political, social, and economic changes entail the recognition of new rights, and the common law, in its eternal youth, grows to meet the demands of society". ... They then clarify their goals: "It is our purpose to consider whether the existing law affords a principle which can properly be invoked to protect the privacy of the individual; and, if it does, what the nature and extent of such protection is". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_laws_of_the_United_States#Brandeis_and_Warren_article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_laws_of_the_United_Sta... Brandeis & Warren were motivated by the evils of "yellow journalism", the social media of its day. "The U.S Constitution safeguards the rights of Americans to privacy and personal autonomy. Although the Constitution does not explicitly provide for such rights, the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution protect these rights, specifically in the areas of marriage, procreation, abortion, private consensual homosexual activity, and medical treatment." https://www.justia.com/constitutional-law/docs/privacy-rights/ https://www.justia.com/constitutional-law/docs/privacy-right... I love the EU's notion of consent wrt privacy (h/t @sschueller). Will definitely learn more about their system. My hunch is consent is akin to respecting another's autonomy.
- godelski 3y ago
  > I love the EU's notion of consent wrt privacy Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the EU laws contingent upon legality? Article 8.2 > Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned __or some other legitimate basis laid down by law.__ Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified. I mean we can take this in good faith, but at the same time Article 20 says everyone is equal in the law but there are several royal families and constitutions that make said families above the law. I love the idea in principle (and far better than nothing) but I personally am not fully trusting. It is, after all, our duties as citizens within a democratic nation(s) to challenge the authority and laws, to keep them in check.
gspencley 3y ago
The distinction makes sense, but of course the counter-argument would be: what prevented someone, using earlier forms of technology, from documenting your presence at that public place and then publishing it ... say in written or illustrated form? We had newspapers, illustrators, journalists and printers well before photography, microphones and the Internet. Even if we remove those media, what is to prevent someone from communicating their observations verbally and having news of your presence spread by word of mouth? A conversation between two people at a coffee shop could be transcribed by pen & paper by an eaves dropper at an adjacent table. The wait staff or owner could report your presence to whomever they choose, including the media. I'm a very private person and welcome more privacy protection, but I've always been swayed logically by the "no expectation of privacy in public" argument. As long as people can see you with your own two eyes and hear you with their own two ears, it seems to me like the existence of recorded media and more efficient distribution channels is moot.
- LeifCarrotson 3y ago
  What prevented documenting and publishing public acts in the past? Merely an infeasibility to scale that with economically and socially reasonable levels of effort - actually an impossibility. The law and culture have not changed fast enough to keep up with obvious conclusions that result from the fast pace of technological change. There is a quantitative but not qualitative difference, but that's still an important difference! For example, imagine that in the 70s, you might have had police officers with radios sitting on the shoulders of roads around a city, watching for a license plate and vehicle description to catch a suspect. That was reasonable, courts reasonably ruled that license plates were public information, that's the whole point of vehicle registration. But it would cost a pile of money to have professional humans use their eyes and brains for every hour you wanted to surveil those roads. It would have been impossible for humans to manually hand-write every plate and vehicle at rush hour, and if they could, it would be impossible for clerks to cross-reference traffic logs and store them in file cabinets, and if they could, it would be impossible to analyze the exploding warehouse of records to find anything of interest. And even if you could, the many humans in that chain would ask questions; you'd employ a tenth of the town to surveil their neighbors. But now, for less than it costs to have a single manned police cruiser on the road for a month, you can have 24/7/365 license plate monitoring on every road in and out of and through a city, logging events to a database that can analyze and query the computationally insignificant few hundred thousand results effortlessly. And that doesn't even get into the novel, unexpected, deanonymizing things you can do once you have reams of data! A cop watching license plates was implicitly limited due to the cost of employing a human, that human's inability to be two places at once, that human's limited attention span, sensory capacity, and data recording abilities. It doesn't mean that removing those limitations and doing the same thing everywhere and all the time with omnipresent, omniscient, effortless nanobot surveillance is reasonable!
Pent 3y ago
>the act of being in public is public the act of being in public may be widely distributed

by hug 3y ago

frankfrankfrank 3y ago

The challenge you have is not language related, but rather logic related. The issue our Swiss friend raises is valid, no matter the language. Do Americans not have an expectation of privacy even when talking in public, based on the expectations of the individuals engaged in speech? For example, when you are at a restaurant with friends, is there not an expectation of privacy within the context of your conversation with someone? Any reasonable person will have an expectation of privacy that will generally be limited to all those people around your table and with whom you will be making eye contact, as long as you are speaking at a tone that is reasonable for that context. No? Is the speaker going to be speaking so that everyone in the restaurant can understand their speech? No? So it’s not public then, right? Ignoring incidental overhearing, of course. Inversely, if we consider what the American system clearly considers private, the home and, by extension, the car; if you have ever heard a conversation through thin walls between apartments or maybe a phone conversation on car speaker blasted speakerphone, is that private then? … are Phone conversations then also not private since in most cases the caller will not likely be aware that their direct conversation partner is blasting their conversation to the parking lot on the car’s speaker phone? These scenarios, among others, beckon a requirement to make privacy expectations approaching unachievable. Is that reasonable? No, of course not. And that’s before we explore things like focused beam microphones that make all conversations within any line of sight or even just things you whisper into someone’s ear not radically private based on the current American nonsensical definition reasonable and privacy. The problem in America is not the speech part, but rather that the logic and reason itself has been inverted and perverted by sophists and abusive manipulators over the decades, which have turned everything upside down, including the definitions of “reasonable”, “public”, and “private”, i.e., the core logic of the matter. None of the founders of America and the writers of the Constitution would recognize any of these current assumptions built into definitive and even the words they wrote, let alone all the illogical and lazy cruft that has been added after the twelfth amendment. They would think we’ve gone insane, because were have our, more accurately, sophist psychological manipulators and abusers have driven us so insane that we engage in the horrid abominations and abuses that are normalized all around us today. It has long been an ever worsening entropy problem.

gmane 3y ago
Wait, why are you drawing the line at the 12th amendment and not the 16th?
hug 3y ago
To provide some clarity on my own position, I understand and echo your desire to have a society in which our quiet moments are not intruded upon. I am not arguing that the expectation that you not be monitored is unreasonable. What I am saying is that these feelings do not line up in a tidy way with the words “private” and “public”. In all versions of modern English that I’m aware of, “public” is an antonym of “private”. In all conversations around this topic, they are often treated as though they are not. There’s an intuition gap that you rely on your conversational partner to cross. What you do is say “I have a right to privacy, and by privacy I do not mean literally private, I mean incidentally non-public, due to circumstance”, only not in so many words. It’s the way I talk about it as well, because there’s no well understood and unambiguous way to describe what I just called “incidentally non-public”. Assuming, of course, that you accept that public and private are antonyms, you can demonstrate this intuition gap by instead of talking about public and private, using another pair of antonyms and talking about up and down, and instead ask the question: Does everyone have the right to be up while down? That’s obviously a terrible and nonsensical question, but I feel it is exactly what some people read when they encounter someone’s desire for privacy in public. How can you be private in public? How can you be up while down? This isn’t sophistry or maliciousness: it’s a real way that real people interpret the conversation. Failure to recognise the intuition gap is what leads to a failure to understand the other person you’re talking to.
- godelski 3y ago
  If you're getting into the definition of public vs private you also need to consider what constitutes a reasonable expectation. Not just from our current reference frame of everyone having phones and every business having cameras, but from a few decades ago as well as a century, or more, ago. What may constitute a reasonable expectation today may be extremely divorced from that of when the laws were written. I love the nuance you are getting into, but I do think it needs to be taken at least one step further for a good conversation to take place. People are working with different assumptions and not communicating these well and results in very different versions of reasonable expectation. 50 years ago, even 20, it was pretty reasonable to assume that you could not, let along would not, be recorded unless you were involved in a large public demonstration. I think if we're getting down to public vs private that we should also consider this aspect. And I think we should recognize the difference between a private activity within a public space from a public activity within a public space. The ecosystem has changed and with it we must be a bit more nuanced.

Libcat99 3y ago

When you are in a physical space, you can look around you and somewhat reliably observe who can see you, hear you, and observe your actions. You've always then had the choice to base your actions and your speech on who will observe them, with the further knowledge that they might go on to share this with others. The difference isn't that what you do now can be shared. It's the ease of sharing and the fidelity with which it can be shared.

godelski 3y ago
I mostly agree, but there's part that you're missing. Ease is a critical issue, but the capacity to record was substantially different back then too, and thus the validity of what was being shared. There's a big difference in someone claiming you said something vs someone having a recording of it. 20 years ago everyone wasn't walking around with a camera and microphone in their pocket. It is not only the ease in sharing and identifying, but even the base capacity to perform the action in the first place. If you were being recorded on video in the past, you'd likely notice the bulky camcorder mounted on some guy's shoulder. (not even mentioning that resolution was very different and depth of field is not a negligible). 20 years ago you did not have a reasonable expectation to be recorded in the public physical space. This is contingent upon the probability of someone being able to perform an action, and even more so without you being aware of said action being performed. That wasn't that long ago...
- Libcat99 3y ago
  That's what I was getting at with the fidelity attribute. Before you could observe an event and remember it (poorly) and share it (slowly) but technology, for better or worse, has greatly increased the possible fidelity of that memory, which can now shared endlessly without losing quality.

specialist 3y ago

Agreed. I also get flummoxed whenever I try to talk about this stuff. Further, I've only recently appreciated that our modern folk understanding of right to privacy has eclipsed its twin, the right to personal autonomy. The development of the doctrine regarding the tort of "invasion of privacy" was largely spurred by the Warren and Brandeis article, "The Right to Privacy". In it, they explain why they wrote the article in its introduction: "Political, social, and economic changes entail the recognition of new rights, and the common law, in its eternal youth, grows to meet the demands of society". ... They then clarify their goals: "It is our purpose to consider whether the existing law affords a principle which can properly be invoked to protect the privacy of the individual; and, if it does, what the nature and extent of such protection is". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_laws_of_the_United_States#Brandeis_and_Warren_article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_laws_of_the_United_Sta... Brandeis & Warren were motivated by the evils of "yellow journalism", the social media of its day. "The U.S Constitution safeguards the rights of Americans to privacy and personal autonomy. Although the Constitution does not explicitly provide for such rights, the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution protect these rights, specifically in the areas of marriage, procreation, abortion, private consensual homosexual activity, and medical treatment." https://www.justia.com/constitutional-law/docs/privacy-rights/ https://www.justia.com/constitutional-law/docs/privacy-right... I love the EU's notion of consent wrt privacy (h/t @sschueller). Will definitely learn more about their system. My hunch is consent is akin to respecting another's autonomy.

godelski 3y ago
> I love the EU's notion of consent wrt privacy Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the EU laws contingent upon legality? Article 8.2 > Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned __or some other legitimate basis laid down by law.__ Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified. I mean we can take this in good faith, but at the same time Article 20 says everyone is equal in the law but there are several royal families and constitutions that make said families above the law. I love the idea in principle (and far better than nothing) but I personally am not fully trusting. It is, after all, our duties as citizens within a democratic nation(s) to challenge the authority and laws, to keep them in check.

gspencley 3y ago

The distinction makes sense, but of course the counter-argument would be: what prevented someone, using earlier forms of technology, from documenting your presence at that public place and then publishing it ... say in written or illustrated form? We had newspapers, illustrators, journalists and printers well before photography, microphones and the Internet. Even if we remove those media, what is to prevent someone from communicating their observations verbally and having news of your presence spread by word of mouth? A conversation between two people at a coffee shop could be transcribed by pen & paper by an eaves dropper at an adjacent table. The wait staff or owner could report your presence to whomever they choose, including the media. I'm a very private person and welcome more privacy protection, but I've always been swayed logically by the "no expectation of privacy in public" argument. As long as people can see you with your own two eyes and hear you with their own two ears, it seems to me like the existence of recorded media and more efficient distribution channels is moot.

LeifCarrotson 3y ago
What prevented documenting and publishing public acts in the past? Merely an infeasibility to scale that with economically and socially reasonable levels of effort - actually an impossibility. The law and culture have not changed fast enough to keep up with obvious conclusions that result from the fast pace of technological change. There is a quantitative but not qualitative difference, but that's still an important difference! For example, imagine that in the 70s, you might have had police officers with radios sitting on the shoulders of roads around a city, watching for a license plate and vehicle description to catch a suspect. That was reasonable, courts reasonably ruled that license plates were public information, that's the whole point of vehicle registration. But it would cost a pile of money to have professional humans use their eyes and brains for every hour you wanted to surveil those roads. It would have been impossible for humans to manually hand-write every plate and vehicle at rush hour, and if they could, it would be impossible for clerks to cross-reference traffic logs and store them in file cabinets, and if they could, it would be impossible to analyze the exploding warehouse of records to find anything of interest. And even if you could, the many humans in that chain would ask questions; you'd employ a tenth of the town to surveil their neighbors. But now, for less than it costs to have a single manned police cruiser on the road for a month, you can have 24/7/365 license plate monitoring on every road in and out of and through a city, logging events to a database that can analyze and query the computationally insignificant few hundred thousand results effortlessly. And that doesn't even get into the novel, unexpected, deanonymizing things you can do once you have reams of data! A cop watching license plates was implicitly limited due to the cost of employing a human, that human's inability to be two places at once, that human's limited attention span, sensory capacity, and data recording abilities. It doesn't mean that removing those limitations and doing the same thing everywhere and all the time with omnipresent, omniscient, effortless nanobot surveillance is reasonable!

Pent 3y ago

>the act of being in public is public the act of being in public may be widely distributed