3 ms·

The whole concept of a threat is all about uncertainty, so it's somewhat incoherent to talk about it in connection with a supposed certain future. An argument

The whole concept of a threat is all about uncertainty, so it's somewhat incoherent to talk about it in connection with a supposed certain future. An argument of the same structure would be: Simply playing russian roulette is still not a threat, if the chamber will be empty. Well, yeah, _if_ - it's a threat precisely because you do not know whether that condition will hold, and there is a reasonable chance that it won't; if you knew, it wouldn't be a threat but either a boring game or a method of killing yourself. Also, why would your argument not apply to medical information, say? If they collected your medical information from your doctor's office to then blackmail you with it, that is not a privacy issue because they could also have come to your door and asked you about your medical history, and that would also be unacceptable, wouldn't it? If I understand your argument right, it is roughly "if 'they' can do something bad in more than one way, then either of the ways is not bad because it would still be bad if the other way was used"? I'm not quite sure how to make sense of that. Also, one anecdote from history: The nazis when they invaded the Netherlands used existing census information on religious affiliation that was easily available on hollerith punch cards to find and deport the jews. Would you say that that information collection was not a threat for the jews who probably got killed faster and in larger numbers than if the data had not been available in that form? edit: One more example to consider: A dictator is not a threat, if he doesn't do anything that would still be inacceptable if it was done by a democracy. Well, a dictator is a threat exactly because you don't know that, and we tend to prefer democracy in order to protect ourselves from that risk of having a dictator of the bad kind.

baddox 12y ago
> If I understand your argument right, it is roughly "if 'they' can do something bad in more than one way, then either of the ways is not bad because it would still be bad if the other way was used"? I'm not quite sure how to make sense of that. I think what you're missing is that I'm not saying that nothing counts as a privacy violation. Medical information, for example, absolutely has an expectation of privacy, but I claim that the outside of your envelopes does not. My point is that the mass collection of information, where there is no expectation of privacy for each piece of that information, is not itself a privacy violation. What people do with information is not what determines whether the collection of that information constitutes a privacy violation.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
  I disagree comprehensively. First, there isn't really such a thing as a generic "expectation of privacy". There is not just "public" and "private", it really is all about necessity and consequences, about who needs to know what and what the potential consequences (good and bad) are when somebody gets to know something about you. If I walk around outside, I don't consider it a violation of my privacy if people don't close their eyes in order to avoid seeing me. Yet, I would very much consider it a violation of my privacy if someone started following me with an HD camera (maybe even streaming it to the internet?), even though they are just "doing something else with the information encoded in the electromagnetic waves reflected from my outside into the public sphere". Or if someone started pointing medical diagnosis equipment at me in public in order to figure out from that same "public informaton" stuff that I very much might consider private. A black-and-white distinction between "public" and "private" information is useless, as there is no such thing - not every personally identifiable information is either not to be shared with anyone or good for printing in the newspaper, most of it is somewhere in between: One expects it to not be a secret, but still to only be shared and used within limits for some sensible reason and purpose. So, I expect my doctor to share my medical info with his assistants as needed, but not to publish it in a book, I expect the info on the outside of letters I send and receive to be read and used by the postal service and people working there for delivering them, but not for publishing a list of my correspondence in the newspaper - and that very much for privacy reasons. Secondly, the simplest reason for why mass collection itself can be a violation of privacy is that there is information in the collection that is not in the individual datum, that is to say, information that only becomes recognizable once you look at the collection as a whole with the right tools. From a single letter, you cannot construct a social graph of a society, but from all the letter meta data, you most certainly can. Another angle to look at it from is to think about it in epistomological terms: Do you think that the work of scientists increases the knowledge of humankind? After all, they are just using "public information" (observations of nature, that is) and transforming it into usable theories about the world. I would think that that work makes a huge difference in terms of the use of that "public information" by humans and the effects of that use, which is why I would say that they are increasing our knowledg. The collection and analysis of personally identifiable "public information", I would argue, has the same effect on the knowledge of the party collecting and analyzing the data about the people that this information is about, namely, they are gaining knowledge about those people as a result of that collection and analysis, and if that knowledge is something that I consider private, I might as well call this investigation a violation of my privacy.

baddox 12y ago

> If I understand your argument right, it is roughly "if 'they' can do something bad in more than one way, then either of the ways is not bad because it would still be bad if the other way was used"? I'm not quite sure how to make sense of that. I think what you're missing is that I'm not saying that nothing counts as a privacy violation. Medical information, for example, absolutely has an expectation of privacy, but I claim that the outside of your envelopes does not. My point is that the mass collection of information, where there is no expectation of privacy for each piece of that information, is not itself a privacy violation. What people do with information is not what determines whether the collection of that information constitutes a privacy violation.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
I disagree comprehensively. First, there isn't really such a thing as a generic "expectation of privacy". There is not just "public" and "private", it really is all about necessity and consequences, about who needs to know what and what the potential consequences (good and bad) are when somebody gets to know something about you. If I walk around outside, I don't consider it a violation of my privacy if people don't close their eyes in order to avoid seeing me. Yet, I would very much consider it a violation of my privacy if someone started following me with an HD camera (maybe even streaming it to the internet?), even though they are just "doing something else with the information encoded in the electromagnetic waves reflected from my outside into the public sphere". Or if someone started pointing medical diagnosis equipment at me in public in order to figure out from that same "public informaton" stuff that I very much might consider private. A black-and-white distinction between "public" and "private" information is useless, as there is no such thing - not every personally identifiable information is either not to be shared with anyone or good for printing in the newspaper, most of it is somewhere in between: One expects it to not be a secret, but still to only be shared and used within limits for some sensible reason and purpose. So, I expect my doctor to share my medical info with his assistants as needed, but not to publish it in a book, I expect the info on the outside of letters I send and receive to be read and used by the postal service and people working there for delivering them, but not for publishing a list of my correspondence in the newspaper - and that very much for privacy reasons. Secondly, the simplest reason for why mass collection itself can be a violation of privacy is that there is information in the collection that is not in the individual datum, that is to say, information that only becomes recognizable once you look at the collection as a whole with the right tools. From a single letter, you cannot construct a social graph of a society, but from all the letter meta data, you most certainly can. Another angle to look at it from is to think about it in epistomological terms: Do you think that the work of scientists increases the knowledge of humankind? After all, they are just using "public information" (observations of nature, that is) and transforming it into usable theories about the world. I would think that that work makes a huge difference in terms of the use of that "public information" by humans and the effects of that use, which is why I would say that they are increasing our knowledg. The collection and analysis of personally identifiable "public information", I would argue, has the same effect on the knowledge of the party collecting and analyzing the data about the people that this information is about, namely, they are gaining knowledge about those people as a result of that collection and analysis, and if that knowledge is something that I consider private, I might as well call this investigation a violation of my privacy.