Lawrence Lessig: Technology Will Create New Models for Privacy Regulation
blogs.wsj.com> It is really a generational effect. People in law school learned this way of thinking 10 years ago, and they are coming into their place in the regulatory space.
As someone in that group, I don't know if I see any evidence of this generational effect. The Internet is just the latest battleground for ideologies that have always existed: consumer protection, national security, business freedom, market solutions. The same sort of thinking guides the people who call for backdoors now, who called for banning encryption in the 1990's, who called for easier access to credit card and other transactions in the 1970's, etc.
Businesses that create technological products are always going to be entities the government can control. And regulators will never be encryption utopians. They'll always be mild pragmatists willing to make compromises whose values fall moderately left or right of center on the authoritarian scale.
Politicians/regulators can never be encryption utopians because they always seek more power. However, widespread adoption of secure encryption [0] could turn proposals to ban it from being seriously "debated", to the equivalent of that state senator who wanted to legislate pi = 3. "Physics drives finance drives politics", and all that.
[0] Obviously without centralized database MITM, using software not distributed by a centralized entity that can be easily controlled as you point out.
It's not even a matter of "politicians wanting more power." The public wants the government to have power over people, because they are (reasonably or not), more scared of other people than they are of the government. People fall on different places on the spectrum for how they weigh the loss of privacy versus the need for security, but very few are willing to say "we need pervasive unbreakable encryption, whatever the consequences to law enforcement." Even terrorism aside, very few people are willing to give up the power of authorities to investigate, say, the transactions of suspected financial criminals.
It's natural for regulators to want more power - since they're good, they can always choose to not wield that power later. The motivation is the same at the smaller per-person scale, with democracy encouraging every person to think as a mini regulator - deciding whether a behavior should be prohibited or encouraged and then enforcing the majority's opinion onto the minority, rather than leaving the behavior unjudged.
Encryption is such an obvious target because it enables nothing besides hiding. Society/government can never see the value in anything that serves to keep society/government out of individuals' business, even though the former only exists on the proceeds of individual autonomy.
So in essence, the crypto/software war is self-defense against govermment/society. Not in the sense of overthrowing or repudiating the entire concept, but in the sense of holding the Schelling point of freedom of speech/thought versus a society/government that, through the same information technology advancement, would otherwise seek to subject them to totalitarian regulation (even if by the majority).
I agree with most of your analysis. That said, between the time the telephone was invented to the time encrypted email was invented, we had a rather prosperous and progressive period during which there did not exist a convenient means of communicating over long distances the government could not access with the appropriate process. I think the whole system is more robust than you give it credit for.
That seems like a pretty short time period to claim "robustness", especially with the quantitative trends the entire time. Remote communication was not so heavily relied upon in the past, whereas now it is a staple of modern life. Furthermore, the scale and inhumanity of the system has increased geometrically, no longer limited by actions of individual agents to perform taps/investigations, but instead a court order (in name only) for an ongoing wireline/database dump of millions of people who are then all investigated statistically.
FWIW, your statement could be made even stronger by saying that never before in history has it been possible for individuals to securely communicate over long distances. But technology adoption does not respect a fundamentalist approach - talking in an isolated house with no electronics was a lot more relevant a hundred years ago than today! So we need to judge the autonomy of an individual carrying out his usual day-to-day tasks in both time frames.
The problem is it isn't a debate about privacy vs security. Backdoored encryption = not secure = bad guys can steal your id, your money, shut down essential services, ...
I think that Lessig has it right: people will not fight for privacy if privacy inconveniences them too much. I jump through hoops to get some small level of privacy and still enjoy web properties that track users.
A little off topic, but I think it is time for the USA to do a "let's go to the moon" type effort to make digital systems secure and protect privacy. I know this is a long shot though: it would take re-purposing the capabilities of the NSA (and the FBI, etc.) to making digital communication secure. Obviously this requires NO BACK DOORS, and more research into digital security. There are a lot of smart people working at the NSA and it would be good to have them working on helpful tasks like securing the Internet for businesses, the government, and individuals - and not waste time on spying on innocent people. In the 1990s the NSA and FBI did a lot of good work in this direction, but then the bogus 'war on terror' pushed them off course.
None of these articles explain why privacy is a good thing. They just assume it to be a fact. I have some issues with this.
What if the entire premise of privacy being beneficial is flawed? What if the actual problem is that we build systems and processes that rely on the unsustainable idea of privacy and the wishful ability to keep secrets? Do people not see that this makes everything more fragile and likely to break?
I don't want more regulations for startups that want to analyze my genome, nor do I want to become an expert in internet security just to browse the web. Writing software is already difficult as it is, and the requirement to protect privacy makes it even more difficult and risky.
The real question is, what can we do to make living a transparent and open life possible.
Privacy is important because people are assholes.
My wife has an ex-boyfriend who went to prison. She was pretty terrified when there was an internet trail to our current home address (which I have since closed). Largely because of our Macy's wedding registry which showed up when you searched her name, which had my name, and there's only one of me in the US.
We know he found the registry because he emailed her about it. But he had to be a bit technical to connect the rest of the dots, and I don't think he did.
Do you seriously believe that we can (or should) reach a point where nobody can be identified or located?
Instead of getting rid of the bad guys (or preferably get rid of incentives that motivate actions you don't agree with), you seem to be suggesting that we should hide from them. I can imagine this would lead to a world with more bad guys (because no effort exists in preventing them), a lucky minority of people who have the skills to remain hidden/unidentified (not mentionning the constant worry and utilitarian trade-offs) while letting those who don't have this chance be vulnerable to this threat.
What I hear is "let's keep marijuana consumption illegal, as long as it's easy for my fortunate white self not to get caught smoking it". No wonder so many visible minorities go to jail for crimes that white people commit just as often, ethnicity is hard to conceal. I have yet to see a movement helping black people look white so that society treats them more fairly.
> Do you seriously believe that we can (or should) reach a point where nobody can be identified or located?
People believing such a thing probably don't understand the fundamental nature of reality. Everything forms a web of causality; all your actions spread outwards at the speed of light, affecting everything else around you. Quite often one can correlate back those effects to their original cause. This is what science does - figuring out new ways to correlate observations with their causes. Progress of technology only means we're getting better at it. I don't see how you can revert back to the pre-industrial levels of privacy without rolling back the industrial revolution.
You're putting a lot of words in my mouth here. That said:
When people serve their time we let them out of prison. But it also doesn't mean people may not still be afraid of them because of what they've done in the past. You cannot lock someone up just because someone is afraid of them. "If they do it again he will go to prison" isn't exactly comforting.
As my father would happily point out, you cannot always lock someone up for being an asshole. Not all asshole behavior is prison worthy. But that doesn't mean that I want to have to endure it because I have an unpopular point of view.
No, I don't think Marijuana consumption should be illegal. If I did it, even if it were legal, I would probably not particularly care to have everyone in the world know about it. That said, making Marijuana legal will do little for the black community. The problems are much deeper.
Bringing up a 300+ year long struggle against oppression isn't exactly a point in your favor of having no privacy.
I wish I could upvote this more. One reply mentions how easy anti-sodomy laws would be to enforce if we had no privacy. Considering how much faith people put in democracy and the democratic process, you'd think that people would concede that it's the law and our influence over it that's the problem, not privacy.
One question I like to propose to those who disagree with this sentiment is as follows:
Imagine you live in a hypothetical world where all things you consider moral, just and socially acceptable were legal and societally acceptable and where everything else was illegal and societally reprehensible. What role would privacy play in such a society? What benefits would it provide?
I have yet to get a good answer to that question; if peeing in public was ok with me, everyone else and perfectly legal, what reason would I have not to do it? (You can mention shaming and whatnot, but I posit that in this hypothetical world based on my morality, if I didn't shame people, no one else would either).
tl;dr: the problem isn't privacy, the problem is law and our inability to influence it, for which our best tool for the problems that arise from our lack of influence is privacy.
Privacy is a protection and insurance for the future.
Things, like say, recording the religion of someone in an open, embracing and understanding society that has full religious freedom, so you understand what your population identifies seems harmless, right?
It certainly seemed like it to the Jews in the Netherlands in the 1930s.
Jews in the Netherlands is a perfect example because I can't see how can one reasonably claim that it proves we shouldn't be doing censuses.
If an evil dictator wants to get you, he will get you, with or without a census available. There are countless other ways for him to explore. Shutting down every possible avenue of global optimization because it relies on knowing stuff about people is not a way to run a civilization.
Would privacy protect a black in 1930's Poland? Would it matter to them if they did or did not register their identity or religion with their government of full religious freedom? Where's their right to privacy (of their ethnicity)?
The only insurance against unrestrained power for anyone's future is restraining the power, not privacy. Privacy is what you resort to when all else fails, which even then is clearly not enough for everyone.
It is well established that the extended civil records of the Netherlands in the 30s contributed to the high rates of mass murder in the Netherlands compared to other countries with less developed systems. This is a real life example of where a lack of privacy thinking, even though not done with bad intent, led to significant loss of life.
Protection of personal rights is not about a single solution, it is about multiple systems in a Swiss cheese model where privacy is one of those layers. Other layers are a judicial system, democratic elections etc. Stating that there are situations where one of the layers fail isn't proving anything, it is obvious that they fail some of the time. The question is if a layer adds something significant some of the time. Privacy does.
Even if privacy successfully protected those people, I would argue that this would make things even worse. Why? Because privacy protecting the majority of people minimizes the apparent danger of the underlying problem (killing Jews), which cause people to ignore the problem as if it doesn't exists, during which the problem grows until privacy proves to not be enough.
Privacy is a painkiller. It gives us the impression that the problem isn't there, but in reality it keeps getting worse until death hits.
You didn't answer anything I proposed - if I'm being oppressed based on something that can't be made private, what difference does privacy make?
> it is about multiple systems in a Swiss cheese model where privacy is one of those layers.
True, but acting like it is the cardinal solution for which ultimate personal freedom will emerge is a farce and is ignoring the real reasons we want privacy in the first place - we don't have the freedom of transparency b/c of legal actors over which we have little to no control.
> Stating that there are situations where one of the layers fail isn't proving anything, it is obvious that they fail some of the time
The point of pointing out the flaw is not to prove that privacy isn't important, but that it's not nearly as important as the underlying issues for which privacy still won't fix.
> The question is if a layer adds something significant some of the time. Privacy does.
Until the unchecked power discriminates based on things that can't be made private. Watch the watchman and privacy becomes a nice bonus rather than a critical component of a half-solution.
Hitler's a good guy. Jews should have been more discrete. Too bad they didn't have encryption back then. /s
> Imagine you live in a hypothetical world where all things you consider moral, just and socially acceptable were legal and societally acceptable and where everything else was illegal and societally reprehensible. What role would privacy play in such a society? What benefits would it provide?
Sure, that hypothetical would be great for _you_ (you being the decider of morality) - but what about everyone else living in the world? It is fundamentally impossible for a world to exist where your hypothetical can be true for everyone.
Consider this - the hypothetical you describe is currently true for some set of people. And yet it ruins lives and causes misery for millions of others.
Precisely! So the issue to solve is how do we create a world that places everyone in their own private moral world, a result of which is a significantly lower dependence on the losing battle of privacy!
There are a couple ways to give us that world: free markets for law, voluntarism, or to a significantly less extreme, smaller federal governments and more influential, perhaps larger local governments, for which you have a significantly greater say in making law. Other patches to the problem of shitty law include greater accountability of elected (politicians) and appointed officials (i.e. police, bureaucrats). These are only the proposals off the top of my head, but already, in the process of tackling this problem, many other problems dissipate for free.
Your proposals aren't really solutions, but ways of kicking the can down the road. The disagreement still exists, it's just hidden in the remainder. They can serve to minimize that disagreement, but it can never be eliminated.
The simplest counter-sentence to how you've stated the problem: let's say someone thinks it is moral to impose their will on to others - how do you give them this world? The only way to actually achieve your utopia is VR.
Good fences make good neighbors - privacy is a fence.
Championing privacy over fixing the reasons we need privacy is the ultimate kicking of the can down the road - encryption won't prevent the government from harassing me based on my skin color or my choice of employment, or anything else I do or am that can't be encrypted.
> let's say someone thinks it is moral to impose their will on to others
I don't know how to respond to that as any rights and morals you could legitimately give yourself or obey by definition can not depend on other people's compliance.
> Good fences make good neighbors - privacy is a fence.
Really? Do you even know your neighbors? Would you really argue that you'd know them less or that they or you'd be "worse" if you didn't have fences?
> encryption won't prevent the government from harassing me based on my skin color or my choice of employment, or anything else I do or am that can't be encrypted.
Agreed. But if these are your overriding concerns, then go campaign for them. Don't campaign against privacy in hope of indirectly fixing your actual concerns. Surely you'd agree a world without privacy but still with governmental discrimination is the worst outcome, and by inverting and campaigning against autonomy you'll find it quite easy to get to.
> I don't know how to respond to that as any rights and morals you could legitimately give yourself or obey by definition can not depend on other people's compliance.
Well it's pretty simple for them to get their subject to comply, by applying pain.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but you'd reply that they are acting immorally. But that is not how you originally defined the problem.
So we change the definition to require non-aggression, there is no one left to enforce transgressions.
So we change the definition to allow aggression only to enforce non-aggression - then we have to pull in a concept of what's-worse to avoid escalation. And this framework must still be agreed upon by everybody!
This is not arbitrary bickering or simply not defining things smart enough. This is the inherent generation of complexity by following implications.
> Really? Do you even know your neighbors?
Now, not so much. In the past, sure. It's a general saying, and it's a general saying for a reason. The idea is to not have to negotiate socially with them. Please read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory), it fits right in with the other concepts you are referencing.
Fences in the past were mostly symbolic. If your neighbor wanted to get past it, he could usually just walk over it. Enforcing privacy is an equivalent of contemporary closed-off neighborhoods, with cameras and guards always on post.
The benefit you gain from making a Schelling point is a social kind of thing. It works because people agree it works. Just like all other customs. People bring up privacy of correspondence as an example of ages-old privacy right, but it works only because everyone agrees that reading others' correspondence is a dick thing. If we can relearn to rely more on such things than on direct enforcement, maybe an open world would be better for everyone than private, locked down one.
Completely agree with everything but the last sentence...
Defecting (reading things one "shouldn't") is economically profitable, just like walking into others' homes and making their stuff into your stuff. Furthermore, it's politically profitable to catch the "bad guys". So the best one could hope for is a social convention to not snoop, prohibition on private surveillance / data mining (what could that even look like?), and the government still snooping everything to ferret out undesirables.
We could probably limit reasons for defecting by living a less competitive lives, but that's dreams of a better-than-Star-Trek-level utopia. Incentives are hard.
As for the government - a world where only the government gets to have privacy is a scary nightmare. A world with a government as transparent as possible, maybe it's workable. Honestly, I don't know. I need to study this more. I just don't like the costs that come with seriously increasing the amount of individual privacy. And/or I have too much faith in the good side of our nature.
Even Star Trek has ranks, and I wouldn't want to be a red shirt.
I don't have much faith in the bad side of our nature not showing. Groupthink is a hell of a drug.
As far as costs, there's a continuum and it certainly has a lot of low hanging fruit. Some of the most glaring privacy problems could be easily fixed by people simply exerting a modicum of self-actualization when choosing software.
> Don't campaign against privacy in hope of indirectly fixing your actual concerns
So that's my fault for conflating two things without making it explicit - 1) privacy is a non-issue b/c of my aforementioned reasons and 2) I believe that no one really wants privacy, they really want the freedom to act transparently without punishment (since we can't have that, we ask for privacy instead).
> But that is not how you originally defined the problem.
B/c the original problem is about the person and their world according to their morals: if I used pain to get my way and it was legal, what need would I have for privacy?
> The idea is to not have to negotiate socially with them.
The article you provided only declares that there are points that exist that people will converge to when coordinating when communication can't be trusted or is non-existant, and I fail to see the relevance of it to this discussion.
> I believe that no one really wants privacy, they really want the freedom to act transparently without punishment
In that framework, punishment includes things like "being shunned by a friend due to exposing your personal beliefs". Yet that friend should have the right to freely associate with whom they please. Please resolve this conflict without requiring people conform to your specifications.
> the original problem is about the person and their world according to their morals
You said: "how do we create a world that places everyone in their own private moral world".
I'm asking how you create this private moral world for someone who's moral desire is to force their will on other people.
Schelling points also apply to abstract concepts, like the idea of property itself. Private property is an abstraction we could take or leave, so why do we find it so useful?
A property line, with a fence or without, very clearly delineates who has authority over which square inch. If your neighbor decides to store stuff on your side of the line, they are clearly in the "wrong". They can easily foresee this, so the situation likely does not even come up.
If we assume that laws can never be perfect, it is obvious why perfect enforcement of laws can never be a completely good thing. Not to mention corrupt officials, selective enforcement, etc.
Again, corrupt officials, selective enforcement, etc are the problems, not lack privacy. There are a number of ways to make the nature of law better (free markets for law, direct democracy, actual representative democracy, etc), which would all render the need for as much privacy as people are advocating moot.
The minute you declare privacy enforcement a greater problem than fair law-making and fair law enforcement, you've started a losing game for which the oppressors (the ones you're using privacy as a defense against) have already won.
Humans lie all the time. We lie to each other, we lie to the government. We cheat, break rules and break laws all the time.
Societies rely on privacy to limit the intrusion of others into our lives. It becomes really easy to avoid enforcing a law when you can't see it happening.
For example, without privacy, sodomy laws become much easier to enforce. No longer would it be 2 closeted gay men living together happily, it would be acceptable for the government to setup a mobile array and detect that the two men were sharing a single bed, and then charge them with sodomy.
Another example. In New Zealand, prostitution is legal. However, income information and receipts are private between the business and the tax department. Visiting a prostitute is generally frowned upon publicly. So, what happens when all prostitutes are "outed", and their customer lists published? Is that a good thing? Is it just another way of making the job illegal again, with all of the societal ills that making it legal was intended to avoid?
For a US example, imagine publishing the health records from Planned Parenthood clinics - any and all. Venereal disease, birth control, abortion, anything.
I don't see how we can prevent intrusion of individuals and governments into private areas of life without a definition and expectation of privacy. Particularly when there are differing opinions on morality and what the government should do to enforce it.
> Humans lie all the time. We lie to each other, we lie to the government. We cheat, break rules and break laws all the time.
And this is fucking up things big time on this planet, and maybe it's high time for it to stop.
A lot of the problems you described have nothing to do with privacy, and are entirely because general population is bunch of hypocritical children. They get scandalized. It's a hallmark of a mature person that they don't get scandalized over things, but that they seek understanding instead.
If anything, sudden and total lack of privacy would show everyone just how hypocritical people are. How many of those against sodomy laws visit prostitutes? How many of those against prostitution are homosexual? Not saying that either is wrong - my point is that what privacy does is it creates power asymmetry. I can shame you all day long for your "sins" and you can't fight back because you don't know about mine. I'm not really convinced that the solution to this problem is more privacy.
Yes, telling people to grow up is a tall order, but I hope that as a civilization, we can reach it. And then, privacy will be something that isn't really needed much, and enforcing it only makes things less efficient.
That, and of course total impossibility of getting back the pre-industrial privacy levels while retaining XXI century technology.
I feel like there are legitimate and illegitimate reasons for privacy and the illegitimate ones are compromising the legitimate ones.
I also think that a lot of the time, we willingly part with privacy (always-on syndrome), and that you can regain it pretty easily without having to fight the government - just go for a walk without your phone.
Are you arguing that it's my responsibility to be careful and discrete when I commit crimes that should be legal in the first place?
If both murder and sodomy are illegal to the eyes of the government, then wouldn't more accessible privacy protect both murderers and sodomists?
Clearly, the issues in the examples you describe are with the expectations of the government and its citizens. I don't want to ever have to lie about things I'm not ashamed of, and neither do I want to be ashamed of things I do. Society's foundation is Trust, and Trust starts with Honesty. We want everyone to be as honest as possible, and we should therefore change the system to motivate honesty. Only then will we have a clear picture of reality, human nature, and problems we ought to fix.
I want lying to be considered as the worst crime. I want a currency that's built on trust. I want every commitment and promises to be tracked and evaluated. I want fairness, and it starts with understanding reality.
We lie so much that we can't imagine a world without a right to it.
> I want lying to be considered as the worst crime. I want a currency that's built on trust. I want every commitment and promises to be tracked and evaluated. I want fairness, and it starts with understanding reality.
Hell yes. I too want people to start treating lying with seriousness it deserves. Lying, lying, lying. It's the thing that rots and destroys our societies. I too keep repeating that civilization starts and ends with trust. Trust people have in the system, towards their leaders, and towards each other. The less trust people have, the more defensive they get, more stupid things they do, and the less efficient everything becomes.
A perfect example is the growth of various anti-science movements, anti-vaccination being a prominent case. Where do you think it comes from? Many like to say that anti-vaxxers are simply stupid, can't comprehend biology or are motivated reasoners. But the reality is simpler, and you can see it by just observing them carefully. They are normal people, like everyone else. They want to be healthy and happy. They want their children to be healthy and happy. The only real difference is that they had their trust in authority broken on a serious level. They don't trust doctors, scientific consensus and government health organizations.
Is this surprising? Frankly, no. Because all of those authorities lie. They lie fucking big, and then they lie small. Not a day goes by when we don't hear about corrupt politicians, when we don't see bullshit papers published in respected journals, when we don't learn a drug is a scam, or plain dangerous. Governments lie, and so do businesses, big and small. They lie in ads, they cheat in stores, they sell us crap - from grocery store washing stale meat in dishwasher fluid through planned obsolescence to good old lying about specs and working hard to silence disgruntled customers.
Frankly, I sometimes wonder why I still trust anyone but people I know personally. I'd like to say that it's because of education, because I can evaluate claims critically. But it's bullshit - a dedicated liar will run circles around everyone but the few smartest people. The truth is, I'm talking a calculated risk every day. And so are the anti-vaxxers. They end up hurting people. But that's not because they're evil or stupid. It's because they've broken under the avalanche of lies.
I completely agree with you.
In a future where "proofs" will be manufactured easily, you can only trust witnesses. For that to work, you need to know that person says the truth. The most in-demand traits for a person (or smart agent or service) in the future will be "trust" (honesty, predictability, reliability).
In a world too complex to do everything yourself (milk the cow, mill the wheat, grow the tomatoes, to make a pizza), we need specialization and delegation. Again, delegating can only be seamless when interacting with parts whose "trust" is effectively tracked and measured.
The donated organ won't go to the first person to ask for it, or the person with the most money. It will go to the best human, whose value might be tightly correlated with their trust score.
Big data, IoT, AI. All the big technologies of the present and future will increasingly rely on our ability to predict the future. That's pretty much what logistics is. You can't predict the future without a reliable system. Again, your predictions are just as solid as the weakest member in your chain. One component lies (or doesn't do as promised), and the whole prediction breaks. That could mean minutes of commuting lost, or millions of people dead. Don't lie, kids.
We need a more general term that encompasses more than just lying. A person needs to accurately understand his abilities in order to commit to a task. Failing to do so affects one's score as if they did lie. I don't see them as being different things. If you misinterpret something and communicate that interpretation, that's also a "lie".
In any case, I think the human brain is losing a lot of energy trying to decide what to say and not say, and whether what an other person say is sincere, polite, or plainly misleading. We're not as smart as we could be, because of this social cancer. That's probably what destroys kids as they grow.
Being honest at a job interview is a sure way not to get the job. Better study the buzzwords the day before and bullshit your way thought. Repeat if you want to reach the top.
> Clearly, the issues in the examples you describe are with the expectations of the government and its citizens. I don't want to ever have to lie about things I'm not ashamed of
That's wonderfully magnanimous of you. But do you think it's reasonable to expect all your fellow citizens to hold that same conviction? Just because you value things that way, doesn't make it applicable to everyone. What I hear you saying is that if everyone would just conform to your worldview, you'd have a much easier time living in it. Or do you think that your view is universal already?
Also, privacy isn't a citizen vs government thing. Privacy is an expression of the power that every individual holds in every interpersonal relationship: the choice to share with or withhold information from another. And that is a personal choice.
Ideologies like "you should not judge" are at least as old as the Bible, yet we still haven't overcome it. In fact, judging from most Twitter stories I hear of (or 4chan/reddit subcultures), I'd say we have seriously regressed as a society in that matter. Please have a solution for solving hate campaigns and other forms of harassment first, before suggesting that we remove discretionary power from every individual.
>I want a currency that's built on trust. I want every commitment and promises to be tracked and evaluated. I want fairness, and it starts with understanding reality.
I'm working this exact problem right now and would love your input. Email me at sunny.gonna at google's mail service.
> The real question is, what can we do to make living a transparent and open life possible
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but are you advocating for people to make as many details of their life open and transparent on the internet because we should have nothing to hide?
Yes. I'm advocating for people to make as many details of their life open and transparent on the Internet.
Unfortunately, society is currently built in a way that coerces me into keeping secrets (i.e., private key encryption, credit card number, ridiculous laws everybody breaks because privacy makes it easy to conceal). I would much rather live in a society that's built in a way that I can be honest about myself and not lose everything in exchange.
There is no debate that one needs to keep some secrets in today's society, but unlike most of you I believe this to be a necessary evil due to the current nature of the system, not something we should strive for in the long term by making privacy more accessible.
I think he's proposing that it's not privacy that's the problem, but society's laws and morality that require us to use privacy to protect ourselves.
If no one had to be punished under unjust laws for living a decent life transparently, why would privacy be beneficial?
Under your scheme, do workers in the military enjoy privacy while they work? If they don't how do you protect the citizens? If they do---and if they are the only people who enjoy privacy in your land of forced transparency---how does this not stabilize to a military dictatorship?
Why would workers in the military enjoy privacy while they work?
What if the actual problem is that we build systems and processes that rely on the unsustainable idea of privacy and the wishful ability to keep secrets? Do people not see that this makes everything more fragile and likely to break?
I think you have that backwards. Privacy is a protection from the massive amount of failure states otherwise present in systems by refusing them information to operate on.
Can we build systems and processes that can protect that information from all known incentives and motivations (both commercial and socially driven). And accommodate for all unforeseen ones, in a society that already doesn't have a single set of harmonious goals?
> Privacy is a protection from the massive amount of failure states otherwise present in systems by refusing them information to operate on.
Then that means he has it right and you might have it backwards: the problems are the massive amount of failure states for which privacy is a protection.
Unless someone proposes a solution to the “massive amount of failure states”, I am going to continue to assume that privacy is a necessary protection from them.
Direct democracy, free markets for law, representative democracy, voluntarism, etc. There are innumerable solutions to the emergent failure states of our legal system and as I stated elsewhere in this thread, if you declare privacy a greater need than better law, law-making and law-enforcement, you've already lost.
We currently have no legal system that can operate in a world without privacy. Maybe in a future someone could invent one, but current judge, jury, lawyer and prosecutor system require that each role has sufficient amount of privacy to be functional.
Imagine being in a trial against Google, knowing that they have access to information for all the participants and their family and friends. Internet searches, phone calls, purchases, browser history, location data, voice recordings, and all the analytic tools to analyze and extrapolate what details can be used for manipulation and sell an argument. How could such trial ever been conducted in a fair way?
Let's assume for a moment that we can create a society with the most perfect law-making government, and that all laws are now perfect, and they're perfectly enforced.
Would people still want privacy?
I believe that the answer is yes. Simply because there will always be the fear that things may change. You only need one imperfect law or law enforcer and you need privacy to protect you. There will never be a point where we can give up privacy, even if everything else is perfect.
Also, arguably, if there were perfect laws then the fact people have privacy or don't have privacy would make no difference so we might as well have it.
In this imaginary world, would you really be worried about the future like that? Would that be a reasonable fear? And if things would suddenly turn dystopian, do you really expect privacy would protect you from an evil government hell-bent on getting you?
Privacy seems to be a mitigation strategy. An insurance for the future, as 'jib said. It may seem like it's in your best interest to pursue it. But it is also worth considering whether this isn't a coordination problem - where the locally best choice for an individual is a very bad when aggregated over entire society.
Anyway, in real world we won't get either perfect privacy nor perfect transparency. The question is, in which direction we should move from the status quo? It's a multidimensional problem; there are many components to privacy that could go either way. Personally, I'm in favour of everyone knowing more about everything, and reducing both means and incentives to lie to one another. "Everyone" includes the government too. I want to trust them. But they do have to earn it, and trust is in short supply nowadays.
First, let's get rid of the idea that a central government has the authority to create and enfore laws. That's pretty much a recipe for disaster.
A free market would pretty much eliminate the need for laws. What's wrong to you, might not be wrong to me. Therefore, you might refuse to help or trade with a person that does X, while I might have no problem with it and even help him.
Moreover, do you have any idea what a world with total privacy would look like? Even without total privacy, how do you even decide where to start (what to make public, what to keep private)? Surely, people will live in fear and keep everything they can private. How would that even work? No Google, no Facebook, no phone directory, all authors will use pseudonyms, etc. Basically, no meaningful connection will be made between people and the IoT will never possibly see the day. We'll all wear masks. Evolution will stop, we'll all die.
I agree with the points about privacy you make all over this discussion thread, and with the last paragraph of your comment here in particular. But I also strongly disagree with the boo-government/yay-free-market proposal.
> First, let's get rid of the idea that a central government has the authority to create and enfore laws. That's pretty much a recipe for disaster.
That's not a recipe for disaster. That's the universal solution for coordination problems we keep arriving at throughout the history. Creating and enforcing universal laws is the one thing government is actually really good at. The market on the other hand, totally sucks at it. It has its strengths though, and whatever the solution is, it will involve a mix of centralized and distributed responsibility.
I refer you to [0] for an in-depth discussion on coordination problems. It's a long read, but totally worth it.
[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Because I agree with everything you've said here, I will take a close look at the content of this link.
I am the kind of person that believes in the existence of a universal absolute moral truth. I don't believe in subjectivity. A disagreement implies that at least one person is wrong. Yet, I don't think a central and rigid infrastructure should exist to enforce this ideal even if we were to discover it.
Can you provide one example of a law that should be enforced by a government?
And you're right about coordination, I don't have all the answers either. Scarce resources, ownership, roads, defense, languages. I'm still not sure how to deal with these in a free market.
> I am the kind of person that believes in the existence of a universal absolute moral truth. I don't believe in subjectivity. A disagreement implies that at least one person is wrong. Yet, I don't think a central and rigid infrastructure should exist to enforce this ideal even if we were to discover it.
I have a similar view of disagreement - it is my belief that two rational people should, having the same information, reach the same conclusion. I don't believe in an "universal absolute moral truth" (after all, where does it come from, and why?), but I think humans share enough of their basic morality to make it de-facto universal for us. We should delegate only the bare minimum of it for the law to enforce, but the government is literally an embodiment of the concept of people getting together and agreeing on things, so I see no problem to it being a way to scale up what in small groups you can do through social customs.
> Can you provide one example of a law that should be enforced by a government?
I think you enumerated some examples yourself - "scarce resources, ownership, roads, defense, languages". Those things are suitable for being managed centrally, and management involves enforcement - even if you delegated most of it to the market, you still need to steer the market to do the job, lest it bails out when it's profitable to do so.
I have just read your link.
I'm one of those people that don't believe humans to be special and would happily see them being replaced by what made them obsolete.
I don't believe in Friendly AI. Yudkowsky's thesis is flawed. We should be replaced.
You don't like humanity, do you? :). Is your disagreement with FAI just about that we don't deserve to survive?
Also, I referred you to Meditations on Moloch not because of FAI, but because of the discussion on coordination problems. What do you think about the article's view of that?
I have no reason to dislike humans. They're the best thing we have today. That doesn't mean something better won't come to replace them.
Friendly AI, by definition, is not true AI. It won't lead to singularity. It's worthless.
What I want is for the universe to evolve as efficiently as possible. We shouldn't slow down progress just because we want to survive. The only "we" is the universe. Selfless we should be.
I'm not sure what solution he's offering to coordination problems. He speaks of consensus and monarchy. He criticizes classical capitalism.
I feel like the capitalist model would be good if incentives were adequate. Money and personal wealth aren't adequate motivations. Selfless capitalism, where systems are optimized toward making the universe better. A system where we all adopt god's-eye-view. That's what I was referring to with my universal absolute moral truth.
Those entities who don't exist for the greater good will be naturally selected out. The fittest will be the most righteous. We need a system to measure righteousness. I'm working on just that.
TL;DR: We can coordinate through the universal absolute moral truth. We just need better tools to accurately grasp it.
I see. I guess you're more selfless than I can ever dream to be - as long as it seems that we're alone in the universe, I want humans to shape and rule it :).
What you say would be a good solution, if we could actually shape incentives like that (and avoid the issue of incentivized incentivizers - an example of which are companies influencing governments to make laws better for those companies). You said that you're working on a part of this problem, on "a system to measure righteousness". This is something I think we could really use, at the very least to express the concept of "a douchebag" within legal system[0]. Can you share some details about your work? I'm interested.
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[0] - Our legal systems try to stick to objective facts and avoid the topic of intent. Understandably so - without a way to read people's minds it turns into walking through a minefield. We can handle quite a lot this way, but in recent times a big part of suffering in this world is being created legally, by people with obviously selfish and malicious intent. We would want to discourage and/or punish such behaviour, but we can't because technically they aren't breaking any laws, even though everyone knows they are douchebags.
In a free market, there are winners and losers. The winners have a strong economic incentive to keep their communication private, as has been the case throughout human history. If you want to prevent this, you need some sort of system that has power over all citizens. But you argue against a central authority of any sort, so how does this work?
In addition, I'm assuming given your distrust for the government and love of markets that all means of communication will be private. Private capital tends to monopoly, so we can expect in your utopia that all means of communication are owned by a small group of people. This group of people has practical control over everyone's data.
This group of people might decide to release everyone's data in order to appease your desire for a post-privacy utopia, but almost certainly they'll keep it for their economic advantage.
The resulting system you are advocating is one in which a tiny percentage of people has near-universal control over the populace.
You can try to equalize things by creating an alternative system in which all data is public, say by having cameras that stream to some publicly accessible resource. But the streaming and the cameras will be the private property of organizations that have a strong incentive for you not to do this. And since the entire infrastructure is owned by such organizations, you would be in violation of your end user agreement to start such a project. It would make you a "liar" when you signed the Internet EULA, which, as you say in another comment, is the worst crime imaginable.
> there are winners and losers
Currently, we are the losers, our governments are the winners.
> The winners have a strong economic incentive to keep their communication private, as has been the case throughout human history.
That's exactly how our govt functions today.
> This group of people might decide to release everyone's data in order to appease your desire for a post-privacy utopia, but almost certainly they'll keep it for their economic advantage.
True, but we are still at the cusp of applications that pay users for using the application and for their info, which could also be made public, but as you said, might not happen.
> The resulting system you are advocating is one in which a tiny percentage of people has near-universal control over the populace.
That's what we have today. Please understand this, the future he is proposing is at worst as bad as what we have today and at best, so much better.
First, thanks for engaging my hypothetical.
Second, while what you said is true, it would also mean that we wouldn't have a perfect law-making govt then, wouldn't it :)?
And even if it was optional (b/c it wasn't necessary), I'd agree that we should still have it, but that's different than codifying it's necessity in law (by the grace of the very people who want to deny it to you) and different than treating privacy as a panacea for protection against unchecked power.
if you declare privacy a greater need than better law, law-making and law-enforcement, you've already lost
I don't see law and privacy as competing for priority, I think they're complementary. Part of striving for better law, better law-making and better enforcement is an understanding that law is not always perfect, and improving law is a gradual, iterative process. Privacy - and other legal protections - are failsafes built into the system of law to mitigate the ways is which we anticipate it may fail.
I didn't have this in mind when I used the term "failure states" in my earlier post, but the choice of language comes from the way we build safety critical system. The primary goal is to build a product that improves lives, but part of that process is identifying ways the product could malfunction or be misused, and applying mitigations to prevent the negative outcomes. Ideally, on a prefect product used expertly, they're just extra features that never get used.
The reason they must exist is that our analysis can't assume the hubris of perfect design and implementation 100% of the time.
You are of course welcome to your preferences and opinion, but shouldn't others also be able to make their own choice that they want privacy? Certainly many feel that way.
I've tried to put together a smartphone that simply gives me the choice: Control over my own data. It seems nearly impossible without a large investment.
No. It's not up to you. You have no right (or at least shouldn't) to expect me from ignoring or forgetting any data whatsoever. You can't just come to me and ask me to forget that you crossed the street. You can't ask me to forget what I just heard. For some reasons, you people seem to think that you have exclusive rights over any information that involves you. In a way, it's just like the music industry trying to stop people from accessing their content through PIPA/SOPA. You're supporting censorship. You're destroying my freedom to information.
On the other hand, you hurt yourself the most. You don't seem to realize that you're rejecting all social interactions that lead us where we are today. You'd rather live alone in the mountains, isolated from evil people like me that want to capture your information. You fund Kickstarter campaigns that build devices and network that willingly gets rid of everything that makes them valuable. And you don't even realize that's a problem.
What I see is a group of people that are scared. Afraid to take risks. You pick the blue pill, hoping to reduce potential losses while completely ignoring all of the gains the red pill would make possible. I can't blame you, loss aversion is a bitch that drives you blind.
> No. It's not up to you. You have no right (or at least shouldn't) to expect me from ignoring or forgetting any data whatsoever
But should I have the right not to tell you about myself?
For that matter, do you have the right not to tell me your credit card number and expiration date?
Of course you have the right not to tell me something. I'm not advocating coercion, quite the opposite.
So, people are allowed to make their own choice that they want privacy? Then what were you responding to when you said "no, it's not up to you"?
Sure, you're free to decide whether you want privacy or not.
Just don't believe this magically prevent others from accessing and using data that involves you. Don't expect me to respect your preferences when I go through you data.
Wow I hope you never have any amount of power over any computer system that handles data. Even for the brief moment before you are fired, what a disaster.
Read The Eternal Value of Privacy by Bruce Schneier:
http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securi...
Everything he states in that article points to privacy being a defense against unchecked power, for which the simplest long-term solution is check the power, not admit defeat to unchecked power and shore up your defenses.
'Check the power' is a naive and impossible solution that has been attempted by essentially every human civilization since the dawn of time and has never, ever worked. Sometimes you just need to recognize truth when it smashes you in the face again and again over thousands of years and accept that we need some way to deal with it.
Also are you really advocating only one line of defense against unchecked power? "Just trust that people with power won't abuse it" isn't good enough and it's never going to be, but that's what you're advocating.
On one hand: no fuck you I want to pee in solitude.
On the other hand: I can't remember the title/author but there has absolutely been the argument floating around for a while that the problem isn't the lack of privacy it's the asymmetry of power combined with asymmetry of privacy.
privacy is of the utmost importance to prevent the degradation of what makes us human; free will.
If Fred goes to a certain three websites fairly regularly, and Joe (a bad guy, thug, gangster, terrorist) also goes to those three websites fairly regularly, some other authority monitoring Fred's traffic could say,"Hey, this Fred guy is following the same patterns as this other bad guy Joe, so we should probably intercept this guy and tell him we're worried he will fall into the same trap as bad guy Joe."
So Fred should hide because some powerful entity could draw invalid conclusions about him?
Who let this powerful entity exist in the first place?
[Moglen] said "You mean The United States government is, from now on, going to keep a list of everybody every American knows. Do you think by any chance that should require a law?" And he just laugh because they did it in a press release in the middle of the night on Wednesday when it was raining
https://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-...
That Enigma project that he bases his opinion on looks rather suspicious for me.
Here is their white-paper: http://enigma.media.mit.edu/enigma_full.pdf
I am a bit skeptical on anything with blockchain in the synopsis these days.