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Maybe I'm alone here, but I never had an expectation of privacy in regards to what I write on the outside of a envelope and drop into a public receptacle (mailb
by elmuchoprez 13y ago
Maybe I'm alone here, but I never had an expectation of privacy in regards to what I write on the outside of a envelope and drop into a public receptacle (mailbox). I expect the contents to be considered highly private, but not the outside.
There's also this issue of willing disclosure of information to an entity. When I put a stamp on something and drop it in the mailbox, I know I'm handing that information over to a government authority (or whatever you want to call the USPS's weird relationship to the government). Regardless of what they are or aren't supposed to do with it, the fact is that I know I'm putting my info in their hands and trusting them. This is unlike PRISM, where I send an email through Gmail with no expectation that it should ever pass through government hands.
Also, I'm under the impression that most if not all hand-written addresses are digitized for sorting purposes. I think you have to be naive to assume the postal service wasn't keeping that data on file.
- asdf3 13y agoAbortion protesters used to write down the license plates... just some publicly available meta-data, right?
- thrownaway2424 13y agoYes. What is your point? Nobody has any expectation of a right to drive anonymously.
- nitrogen 13y agoBut they do have a right to privacy in their medical history. Recording license plate numbers at a hospital, abortion clinic, etc. is a violation of that right, even if it might otherwise be legal.
- thrownaway2424 13y agoThat logic isn't obviously correct. People do not have a right to go about in public, to and from notorious places, in a 2-ton death monster that requires licensure and indemnification to operate, anonymously. People requiring a higher degree of privacy than that offered by cars would be better served taking their bicycles.
- nitrogen 13y agoI would argue that a de facto right to privacy is created by the nature of the destination. It doesn't matter if someone can see you or your car, the fact that it's a medical destination should create a right to privacy of that trip.
- thrownaway2424 13y agoI would argue that your moon-man jurisprudence is weird.
- mpyne 13y ago> It doesn't matter if someone can see you or your car, the fact that it's a medical destination should create a right to privacy of that trip. So what you're saying is that the government should enforce a built-in gag order on people? Interesting...
- nitrogen 13y ago> It doesn't matter if someone can see you or your car, the fact that it's a medical destination should create a right to privacy of that trip. So what you're saying is that the government should enforce a built-in gag order on people? Interesting... They already do with regard to medical information, in the form of HIPAA. A right to privacy has to include the right to prevent others from disclosing certain kinds of information about oneself. You could also consider it from a defamation/slander/libel perspective.
- mpyne 13y ago> They already do with regard to medical information, in the form of HIPAA. HIPAA type records are not publically displayed when people walk outside. To the extent that a given condition is public people are allowed to note that. This is why assholes were legally allowed to call me pimple-face, for instance.
- 13y ago
- ceol 13y agoIt's not legally possible for a random citizen to get personal information from a license plate, so having someone's license plate number available isn't a violation of their right to privacy.
- lightbritefight 13y agoHis point is that this metadata has one intended use, and that it is not supposed to be re-purposed to aid in the harassment of the people you disagree with.
- elmuchoprez 13y agoEven if someone thought such actions were unreasonable, I have no idea how you'd use the law to prevent it.
- betterunix 13y agoIn this century, we certainly can: do not have license plates at all, use radio beacons instead, which send encrypted copies of the plate. The police would be allowed to request decryption from the DMV (e.g., "running the plates"), and a few other authorized people, but the general public could not. The secret keys would be the weak point, and would have to be held only in a limited number of DMV data centers (which would help in establishing an audit trail when plates are accessed). I'm not saying it is necessarily something that should be done, but it certainly can be done.
- reustle 13y agoAnd if you see a hit and run, good luck helping the other guy out by "grabbing his plate number"
- betterunix 13y agoI'm not sure that would be so hard to solve. You can record the ciphertext plate and give that to the police. Really the question is, "How important is this problem? Do we care about license plate privacy?"
- ceol 13y agoA license plate is already essentially encrypted. It's a random sequence of letters and numbers that correspond with a unique individual's information. It contains no personal information in itself.
- betterunix 13y agoExcept that your car shows everyone the same license plate every time they look at it. This would be completely unacceptable for a cryptographic solution, which would use fresh randomness to respond to every request (in theory).
- namlem 13y agoShould they not be allowed to collect that information?
- mitchty 13y agoI'm curious as well, additionally how would this be enforced. In addition the collection isn't the issue, its what you do with that information after the fact that tends to be the issue at hand.
- jack-r-abbit 13y agoYes, the plate number on your vehicle is publicly available data. But I don't see how that is very usefully. I'm not sure there is any way for a random person to do anything with a plate number. It would require the person to have some sort of connection to the DMV or other agency that has access to your name and address based on the plate number. And those people are still not going to have access to your medical records even if they did manage to get your name and address just by knowing your plate number. EDIT: the bit about getting at medical records seeped in from reading another comment.
- jlgreco 13y agoI doubt an anti-abortion protestor who is collecting license plate numbers is doing it to get a hold of medical records. They have already made their "judgement".
- pfortuny 13y agoThe fact that some people are "naive" does not imply what they expect to be stupid or unnecessary. Anyone could argue for censorship and for reading your letters: "it is because of the children"... You are putting them in the hands of the USPS.
- nmcfarl 13y agoScope matters. It’s quite different to assume that people can look at the outside of any particular letter, than it is to assume that people are building a database of all your mail, and doing social network analysis on it. The results of the 2 actions are radically different, with radically different amounts of information gleaned.
- devindotcom 13y agoIsn't that rather like the argument used regarding the JSTOR data, which we all rejected vehemently?