3 ms·

Part of the problem, I think, is that our concept of privacy is tightly linked with our physical embodiment. But our concept of self is no longer limited to our

by ijk 13y ago

Part of the problem, I think, is that our concept of privacy is tightly linked with our physical embodiment. But our concept of self is no longer limited to our bodies. We conceive of our online avatars as ourselves. But our instincts about privacy haven't kept pace.

comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
Right. Once upon a time, the physical control over our bodies and our personal property was an adequate definition of privacy. Yes, there were many corner cases, even two centuries ago, but it was "good enough" approximately always. Why make messy legislation over small problems? The Constitution never even tried to touch these issues. Over time the importance of all those corner cases has expanded, and the increased rate of growth of that importance is downright dizzying in the last decade or two. In today's world we have our old fashioned physical privacy (for the most part), and HIPAA to cover some narrow issues. That is it. In our brave new world, we do not really own our financial transaction records. For the most part those are privately owned records in the hands of various profit-driven corporations, and some of them happen to send us a copy of a subset of those records every month. rayiner (above) discusses this topic rather well. But I want to emphasize a different point: we can have privacy but we need to recognize we are basically starting from scratch. Trying to bemoan that the laws have been broken is counterproductive -- the spies have good lawyers and they have correctly identified gigantic legal loopholes. Even if privacy advocates win a few battles, the spies are still going to win the war, until we change the basic rules of the game with new legislation.
state 13y ago
Another way to look at it is that we haven't worked hard enough to build tools that adequately help us either build a new intuition, or maintain the physical metaphors. Perhaps more fundamentally, we haven't found business models to sustain the practice of thinking about digital tools in that way.

by ijk 13y ago

comrade_ogilvy 13y ago

Right. Once upon a time, the physical control over our bodies and our personal property was an adequate definition of privacy. Yes, there were many corner cases, even two centuries ago, but it was "good enough" approximately always. Why make messy legislation over small problems? The Constitution never even tried to touch these issues. Over time the importance of all those corner cases has expanded, and the increased rate of growth of that importance is downright dizzying in the last decade or two. In today's world we have our old fashioned physical privacy (for the most part), and HIPAA to cover some narrow issues. That is it. In our brave new world, we do not really own our financial transaction records. For the most part those are privately owned records in the hands of various profit-driven corporations, and some of them happen to send us a copy of a subset of those records every month. rayiner (above) discusses this topic rather well. But I want to emphasize a different point: we can have privacy but we need to recognize we are basically starting from scratch. Trying to bemoan that the laws have been broken is counterproductive -- the spies have good lawyers and they have correctly identified gigantic legal loopholes. Even if privacy advocates win a few battles, the spies are still going to win the war, until we change the basic rules of the game with new legislation.

state 13y ago

Another way to look at it is that we haven't worked hard enough to build tools that adequately help us either build a new intuition, or maintain the physical metaphors. Perhaps more fundamentally, we haven't found business models to sustain the practice of thinking about digital tools in that way.