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This rather heavily begs the question what do we mean by "freedom"? We don't mean anonymity. Acting in secret is not freedom - acting openly and not being pers

This rather heavily begs the question what do we mean by "freedom"? We don't mean anonymity. Acting in secret is not freedom - acting openly and not being persecuted or prosecuted is freedom. The solution is what it is in real offline life. A regulated legal framework that allows most and limits little, a open dynamic culture that accepts diversity and constant change. If we are worried that digital freedom will be taken from us, without anyone noticing, we should be worried about all our freedoms - and the solutions are still the same - democracy, voting, making a noise, agitating our neighbours. " Let governments be governments"

tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
It’s an important question because “digital freedom” tends to be code for “I want the Internet like how it was when I was younger”, and then throw in some stuff about jailbreaking iPhones or whatever for good measure.
- orwin 3y ago
  I want to be able to use the Os I want on the computer I want, with the browser I want to be able to connect to my bank and my government websites. As banks and governments move critical parts of their working online, it becomes harder to not use their online tools. If I'm not free to use the tools I want to do so, my freedoms were infringed.
- concordDance 3y ago
  I want to not have to worry about a government 30 years from now being able to quickly and quietly make unmonitored person-to-person communication illegal. There should be a whole bunch of difficult and complicated steps involved if they don't want to just shut down half their IT.
dools 3y ago
> This rather heavily begs the question what do we mean by "freedom"? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
attah_ 3y ago
To expand on your idea to compare with the "real offline life"... While anonymity should not need to be a top-priority goal in and of itself, you also don't see people running around with their id-cards taped to their foreheads for easy access.
- landemva 3y ago
  I see plenty of people enthusiastically volunteering for the TSA facial recognition roll-out. People seem to love easy access government surveillance.
- lifeisstillgood 3y ago
  The thing is, we will. And do. I mean my face is of course my fortune, but it is also my username. A frankly it's a username I have been using a lot longer than 'lifeisstillgood'. my analogy is that one upon a time we were all walking dow the street in Victoria London during one of Sherlock Holmes "peasoupers". Only people who got up close to you could see what you were doing and even reognise you. But technology has cleaned up the air. Now anyone can see from who knows how far away. The privacy we thought we had because of the peasouper is revealed to be a mirage, we were always walking around naked, it just was harder to see. We can simply accept this, or far more likely find a cultural consensus. Privacy can be violated for the public good (hunting offenders, medical epidemiologists etc), but otherwise you are not allowed to use the knowledge you have to exploit or influence. No adverts based on prior activity, no Cambridge Analytica creating ads just for you. We are heading there. That Facebook and amazon more or less publish every ad campaign is incredible - imagine trying to persuade parliaments in 50 countries to pass that sort of legislation. We are a long way from that "cultural consensus". We will probably get halfway there in the grey areas - like facebook deciding to publish all ads. The British politician Nick Clegg is likely able to make more influence globally at Facebook than if he became PM. But we are in the culture wars, and we need to fight. The law, the application of the law - these matter online and offline. So vote. And vote in primaries too because that shapes so much. (Weird idea - Oz has compulsory voting to ensure votes reflect "everyone". What if we had compulsory political party membership so that parties and primaries reflected the population ...)
fnord123 3y ago
There's a huge burden on individuals to prove that another organization is using data to persecute them and the definitions or persecution. Before GDPR did you know how vast the network of 3rd parties handling your data was? I didn't! Without this, the next best thing is anonymity which is simpler to enforce and covers future eventualities. >The solution is what it is in real offline life. A regulated legal framework that allows most and limits little, a open dynamic culture that accepts diversity and constant change. The real offline life where people can be punished in the US for aiding abortions? Or where homosexuality is illegal in many countries? Or where people conflate a mental disorder (paedophilia) with a criminal act (child sex abuse) (intentionally edgy example to highlight the edge of what's acceptable). >and the solutions are still the same - democracy, voting, making a noise, agitating our neighbours. This is good advice for the Belarusians with bloodied faces and no change. Or the million people who marched against the Invasion of Iraq.
- lifeisstillgood 3y ago
  We have many offline problems - yes abortion is now more or less illegal in the US. You know what chnaged that? voting. You know what can change it back. Democracy. A VPN won't. Democracy will. Double down on democracy. It's hard complicated and messy. But there are no silver bullets.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    Do you know what drives democracy? People. Do you know what drives people? Targeted brainwashing from companies like Facebook.
    - lifeisstillgood 3y ago
      No. Just No. Look Brexit was shit. But it was democratic shit. 20 million people did not get tricked by their Facebook feeds. Hell 20 million people did not get mind controlled by Nigel Farage's "I'm just sayin" approach. 20 million people were asked "the country is run by thousands of highly educated, slightly patronising, articulate, over-achieving technocrats who want the best for everyone and frequently find the laws of unintended consequences bite and have not yet worked out that not everyone lives in leafy surrey. Do these people annoy you? vote now" Oh hell I don't know why 20 million people voted for economic and cultural self harm. Because we aren't sharing out the wealth properly I guess. But it was not because "we were tricked". It's because "we refuse to accept the model of how the world works thet you are operating on and want to use ours. The democratic version of Adam Savages "I reject your reality and substitute my own" The problem is without an agreed reality to substitute everyone put in their favourite untested political world view.
verisimi 3y ago
> We don't mean anonymity. Acting in secret is not freedom - acting openly and not being persecuted or prosecuted is freedom. So, if I openly state that I do not acquiesce to any government (all external force is immoral imo) - does that mean I am now free, and no longer subject to its laws, pay taxes, etc? So, I don't think your definition of freedom cuts it. Any answer that assumes 'government' as part of the answer, and justifies acting with force against others, has to be wrong (immoral). Far better to follow the golden rule: Do not treat others in ways that you would not like to be treated I think that does it.
- lifeisstillgood 3y ago
  I'm sorry but I maybe feeling "off" today, but we should all be beyond kindergarten political philosophy. Anarchy is what it sounds like - awful and not some middle class libertarian utopia. Yes we need government. And these days we need government to roll up its sleeves and be government. We know you cannot arrange the bread delivery for London through one department but you can force privatised water companies to invest before dividends over periods of decades.
  - verisimi 3y ago
    You're not feeling off. You simply don't understand that basic morality means that you cannot force others to do what you think is right for them to do. You want to find a way to get others to do what you want. This is immoral - you do not want others to have or exercise their freewill. And you want to use other people to force your opinions via police, legal system, etc on others. Put simply you think anarchy is a political philosophy. Whereas anarchy is a moral position - it advocates for free association with others - ie no force. The fact is that it is not morally acceptable to force others to do what you would like them to do, if they are not harming you. You wouldn't force your neighbour/friends/family to do what you say, if they are not harming you. But you consent to government using immoral force to get others to do what you want (steal money, enforce certain behaviour, etc, etc). In fact you think we need something like a dictatorship to wield even more force even more overtly. I think you will get your desire, unfortunately, as most people agree with you.
bluescrn 3y ago
> This rather heavily begs the question what do we mean by "freedom"? Freedom is what 'the bad guys' want, so good people must do everything they can to destroy it.
mindslight 3y ago
No, we most certainly do mean anonymity is a basic part of digital freedom. The only way you could consistently argue that it's not necessary is to advocate prohibiting anyone, including individuals, treating you differently for anything you've said. Which is clearly impossible. Your framing is really just right in line with the bog standard authoritarian pattern of redefining "true" freedom as something that can be comfortably tolerated and/or further chipped away at down the line.
- lifeisstillgood 3y ago
  Wait what? Of course what you say (and do) affects how others perceive you. Just as Uncle Jim drunkenly announcing over Xmas dinner how that Hitler guy had a good plan will affect how everyone sees him in the morning, your twitter feed will have an effect on how your neighbours talk to you. That's a good thing 99% of the time. Social strictures have been how humans managed society for thousands of years. It can lead to terrible things of course - but we like to think we have built systems of justice and governance to overcome them. But suddenly making everyone invisible and able to speak and act without consequences seems a bad idea in the real world - i am not sure why it's a good idea online.
  - mindslight 3y ago
    Well yes of course, your first paragraph was exactly my subpoint - declaring otherwise would be impossible. From there it follows that it is indeed a proper freedom to be able to communicate while limiting the scope of who is privy to that communication, including limiting what can be attributed to some singular inescapable "identity". Saying that preventing this is "a good thing 99% of the time" is a baseless assertion. While this may appear similar to how social strictures have been managed for thousands of years - that's thousands of years of oppression of individuality and persecution for deviating from the herd. The West has overtly bucked that vein of collectivism, which I'd call progress. Furthermore what you're invoking as some open-and-shut traditional state of affairs was anything but. Witness the concept of hearsay - where party B claims that party A has said something, ostensibly so that others will judge party A for it, but modulo B's reputation. Digital communications render hearsay moot - the default result of party B being able to prove to themselves that party A said something, is that party B can also prove to anyone that party A said that thing. Hence the need for the cryptographic property of repudiation, as the physics of digital information leaves no ambiguous middle ground.

tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago

It’s an important question because “digital freedom” tends to be code for “I want the Internet like how it was when I was younger”, and then throw in some stuff about jailbreaking iPhones or whatever for good measure.

orwin 3y ago
I want to be able to use the Os I want on the computer I want, with the browser I want to be able to connect to my bank and my government websites. As banks and governments move critical parts of their working online, it becomes harder to not use their online tools. If I'm not free to use the tools I want to do so, my freedoms were infringed.
concordDance 3y ago
I want to not have to worry about a government 30 years from now being able to quickly and quietly make unmonitored person-to-person communication illegal. There should be a whole bunch of difficult and complicated steps involved if they don't want to just shut down half their IT.

dools 3y ago

> This rather heavily begs the question what do we mean by "freedom"? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

attah_ 3y ago

To expand on your idea to compare with the "real offline life"... While anonymity should not need to be a top-priority goal in and of itself, you also don't see people running around with their id-cards taped to their foreheads for easy access.

landemva 3y ago
I see plenty of people enthusiastically volunteering for the TSA facial recognition roll-out. People seem to love easy access government surveillance.
lifeisstillgood 3y ago
The thing is, we will. And do. I mean my face is of course my fortune, but it is also my username. A frankly it's a username I have been using a lot longer than 'lifeisstillgood'. my analogy is that one upon a time we were all walking dow the street in Victoria London during one of Sherlock Holmes "peasoupers". Only people who got up close to you could see what you were doing and even reognise you. But technology has cleaned up the air. Now anyone can see from who knows how far away. The privacy we thought we had because of the peasouper is revealed to be a mirage, we were always walking around naked, it just was harder to see. We can simply accept this, or far more likely find a cultural consensus. Privacy can be violated for the public good (hunting offenders, medical epidemiologists etc), but otherwise you are not allowed to use the knowledge you have to exploit or influence. No adverts based on prior activity, no Cambridge Analytica creating ads just for you. We are heading there. That Facebook and amazon more or less publish every ad campaign is incredible - imagine trying to persuade parliaments in 50 countries to pass that sort of legislation. We are a long way from that "cultural consensus". We will probably get halfway there in the grey areas - like facebook deciding to publish all ads. The British politician Nick Clegg is likely able to make more influence globally at Facebook than if he became PM. But we are in the culture wars, and we need to fight. The law, the application of the law - these matter online and offline. So vote. And vote in primaries too because that shapes so much. (Weird idea - Oz has compulsory voting to ensure votes reflect "everyone". What if we had compulsory political party membership so that parties and primaries reflected the population ...)

fnord123 3y ago

There's a huge burden on individuals to prove that another organization is using data to persecute them and the definitions or persecution. Before GDPR did you know how vast the network of 3rd parties handling your data was? I didn't! Without this, the next best thing is anonymity which is simpler to enforce and covers future eventualities. >The solution is what it is in real offline life. A regulated legal framework that allows most and limits little, a open dynamic culture that accepts diversity and constant change. The real offline life where people can be punished in the US for aiding abortions? Or where homosexuality is illegal in many countries? Or where people conflate a mental disorder (paedophilia) with a criminal act (child sex abuse) (intentionally edgy example to highlight the edge of what's acceptable). >and the solutions are still the same - democracy, voting, making a noise, agitating our neighbours. This is good advice for the Belarusians with bloodied faces and no change. Or the million people who marched against the Invasion of Iraq.

lifeisstillgood 3y ago
We have many offline problems - yes abortion is now more or less illegal in the US. You know what chnaged that? voting. You know what can change it back. Democracy. A VPN won't. Democracy will. Double down on democracy. It's hard complicated and messy. But there are no silver bullets.
- midasuni 3y ago
  Do you know what drives democracy? People. Do you know what drives people? Targeted brainwashing from companies like Facebook.
  - lifeisstillgood 3y ago
    No. Just No. Look Brexit was shit. But it was democratic shit. 20 million people did not get tricked by their Facebook feeds. Hell 20 million people did not get mind controlled by Nigel Farage's "I'm just sayin" approach. 20 million people were asked "the country is run by thousands of highly educated, slightly patronising, articulate, over-achieving technocrats who want the best for everyone and frequently find the laws of unintended consequences bite and have not yet worked out that not everyone lives in leafy surrey. Do these people annoy you? vote now" Oh hell I don't know why 20 million people voted for economic and cultural self harm. Because we aren't sharing out the wealth properly I guess. But it was not because "we were tricked". It's because "we refuse to accept the model of how the world works thet you are operating on and want to use ours. The democratic version of Adam Savages "I reject your reality and substitute my own" The problem is without an agreed reality to substitute everyone put in their favourite untested political world view.

verisimi 3y ago

> We don't mean anonymity. Acting in secret is not freedom - acting openly and not being persecuted or prosecuted is freedom. So, if I openly state that I do not acquiesce to any government (all external force is immoral imo) - does that mean I am now free, and no longer subject to its laws, pay taxes, etc? So, I don't think your definition of freedom cuts it. Any answer that assumes 'government' as part of the answer, and justifies acting with force against others, has to be wrong (immoral). Far better to follow the golden rule: Do not treat others in ways that you would not like to be treated I think that does it.

lifeisstillgood 3y ago
I'm sorry but I maybe feeling "off" today, but we should all be beyond kindergarten political philosophy. Anarchy is what it sounds like - awful and not some middle class libertarian utopia. Yes we need government. And these days we need government to roll up its sleeves and be government. We know you cannot arrange the bread delivery for London through one department but you can force privatised water companies to invest before dividends over periods of decades.
- verisimi 3y ago
  You're not feeling off. You simply don't understand that basic morality means that you cannot force others to do what you think is right for them to do. You want to find a way to get others to do what you want. This is immoral - you do not want others to have or exercise their freewill. And you want to use other people to force your opinions via police, legal system, etc on others. Put simply you think anarchy is a political philosophy. Whereas anarchy is a moral position - it advocates for free association with others - ie no force. The fact is that it is not morally acceptable to force others to do what you would like them to do, if they are not harming you. You wouldn't force your neighbour/friends/family to do what you say, if they are not harming you. But you consent to government using immoral force to get others to do what you want (steal money, enforce certain behaviour, etc, etc). In fact you think we need something like a dictatorship to wield even more force even more overtly. I think you will get your desire, unfortunately, as most people agree with you.

bluescrn 3y ago

> This rather heavily begs the question what do we mean by "freedom"? Freedom is what 'the bad guys' want, so good people must do everything they can to destroy it.

mindslight 3y ago

No, we most certainly do mean anonymity is a basic part of digital freedom. The only way you could consistently argue that it's not necessary is to advocate prohibiting anyone, including individuals, treating you differently for anything you've said. Which is clearly impossible. Your framing is really just right in line with the bog standard authoritarian pattern of redefining "true" freedom as something that can be comfortably tolerated and/or further chipped away at down the line.

lifeisstillgood 3y ago
Wait what? Of course what you say (and do) affects how others perceive you. Just as Uncle Jim drunkenly announcing over Xmas dinner how that Hitler guy had a good plan will affect how everyone sees him in the morning, your twitter feed will have an effect on how your neighbours talk to you. That's a good thing 99% of the time. Social strictures have been how humans managed society for thousands of years. It can lead to terrible things of course - but we like to think we have built systems of justice and governance to overcome them. But suddenly making everyone invisible and able to speak and act without consequences seems a bad idea in the real world - i am not sure why it's a good idea online.
- mindslight 3y ago
  Well yes of course, your first paragraph was exactly my subpoint - declaring otherwise would be impossible. From there it follows that it is indeed a proper freedom to be able to communicate while limiting the scope of who is privy to that communication, including limiting what can be attributed to some singular inescapable "identity". Saying that preventing this is "a good thing 99% of the time" is a baseless assertion. While this may appear similar to how social strictures have been managed for thousands of years - that's thousands of years of oppression of individuality and persecution for deviating from the herd. The West has overtly bucked that vein of collectivism, which I'd call progress. Furthermore what you're invoking as some open-and-shut traditional state of affairs was anything but. Witness the concept of hearsay - where party B claims that party A has said something, ostensibly so that others will judge party A for it, but modulo B's reputation. Digital communications render hearsay moot - the default result of party B being able to prove to themselves that party A said something, is that party B can also prove to anyone that party A said that thing. Hence the need for the cryptographic property of repudiation, as the physics of digital information leaves no ambiguous middle ground.