It is. But when you make that observation, you should be aware that the weirdness dates back into the 1800's (at least); metadata surveillance was litigated in the dawn of the telegram era.
This is one of the things that surprised me the most. After reading about the Snowden documents this summer, I did some historical reading on the topic. I was amazed at the lengthy progression of surveillance in the U.S., and as a result, I am no longer amazed at the Snowden documents. It's all business as usual.
(I'm not convinced, though, that it's all okay... there seems to be both real and potential abuse in the system.)
Our ability to exploit metadata has grown by leaps and bounds since the 1800s. What was possible then and what is possible now are two different things entirely.
It's simply not possible any more, except via face-to-face chat, to communicate with someone without turning over some metadata (or possibly data) to a 3rd party.
Letter? Envelope gets scanned. Calls? Logged and your location is tracked to boot. Internet? Tapped. What's left?
Carrier pigeons? On my commute this morning, while dodging a flock of Canada Geese that live in park, I was wondering if anyone has ever tried to ship illegal items via migrating birds. I had to ponder how much cocaine, or other illicit substance, a goose could carry. And if the shipment didn't make it, does the bird get whacked?
Anyway, if you're face-to-face with someone they still tracked both of your positions to/from the meeting and used cameras in the area to run facial recognition. Then they transcribed the convo to text by hijacking area mics or using the cameras for speech recognition.
If you're really important they'll land a tiny UAV on your person and literally 'bug' you. Better to just stay inside and keep your waste in mason jars...
Thanks for the link! I Googled this half-heartedly this morning while cleaning out my inbox but didn't have time to sift through the results. Funny stuff!
If you're in public, you have no expectation of privacy. So as cameras and facial recognition roll out further, you won't be able to go to another person's house to do that face-to-face without the metadata being created anyway.
In public, people instinctively have an expectation of privacy. If you started following people around with a video camera and microphone (or even just started staring at every passerby in the eye without breaking eye contact), you'd get a lot of unhappy reactions.
Having ubiquitous automated surveillance is effectively the same as having someone follow everybody around with a camera and microphone, so the public's reaction to the latter should be used to determine policy with regard to the former.
The lack of privacy in public spaces is such because it's unreasonable to have an expectation of privacy. Until we're all cyborgs and have our vision automatically filtered, it's unreasonable to expect that you will remain unseen when walking through a public park.
The lack of privacy in public spaces is based on the ubiquity. If you followed someone around, the issue isn't a violation of privacy. It's harassment: the singling out of an individual for exceptional behavior. If you plant a camera and watch everyone, then it becomes a lot more OK. (Still arguably not, but you'd get far fewer "unhappy reactions".)
The lack of privacy in public spaces is such because it's unreasonable to have an expectation of privacy. Until we're all cyborgs and have our vision automatically filtered, it's unreasonable to expect that you will remain unseen when walking through a public park.
It's only unreasonable if you say it is. Different cultures have made different decisions with regard to what's socially acceptable to notice about others' behavior in public. It's perfectly reasonable to expect that you will remain unfollowed when walking through a public park, and ubiquitous surveillance is much closer to following everybody than noticing everybody.
If you plant a camera and watch everyone, then it becomes a lot more OK. (Still arguably not, but you'd get far fewer "unhappy reactions".)
I'd argue this is only because people aren't cognizant of the fact that planting a camera to watch everyone is the same as planting people to follow everyone. People's instincts haven't caught up with the reality that is presented by ubiquitous surveillance, so IMO the right way in this case to decide whether surveillance is acceptable is by analogizing to the closest available cultural and instinctive concept that is still fully functional.
> ubiquitous surveillance is much closer to following everybody than noticing everybody
The issue is still that you're likening surveillance to harassment more than you're likening it to an intrusion of privacy. Based on this argument alone, I'm less inclined to agree with your position, because surveillance isn't harassment.
> People's instincts haven't caught up with the reality that is presented by ubiquitous surveillance, so IMO the right way in this case to decide whether surveillance is acceptable is by analogizing to the closest available cultural and instinctive concept that is still fully functional.
You realize you're not saying anything more than, "I think it's wrong, so I'm going to go searching for a rationalization," right?
I don't disagree that the surveillance we can safely suspect is being done by governmental organizations is probably immoral and should be illegal, but what I'm not hearing is a solid, justified argument for your position other than, "It's icky." You don't even have the fallback of "everyone thinks it's icky" since by your own admission, people don't.
I'm not interested in doing that hard philosophical work, personally, so I'll leave you with a suggestion. Privacy, at its root, is really about dignity: its most ancient manifestation is the capacity to relax without tainting one's public image, whatever that image may be. It is from this foundation that all other arguments about privacy are really built. So I'd challenge you to show that ubiquitous surveillance necessarily violates everyone's dignity.
I think you'll find that more difficult than you expect, but I don't think it's impossible to come up with a reasonably sound proof.
The issue is still that you're likening surveillance to harassment more than you're likening it to an intrusion of privacy. Based on this argument alone, I'm less inclined to agree with your position, because surveillance isn't harassment.
You're still using definitions of privacy violation, surveillance, and harassment with which I do not agree. The distinctions between the three don't have to be drawn where you seem to be drawing them, and both the example I gave and invisible surveillance should qualify as all three.
By the way, would you still call it harassment if you never got in the way of the person you were following, never acknowledged your presence, and generally let them go about their business while you were busily recording everything they did? Most people would still be very unhappy.
You realize you're not saying anything more than, "I think it's wrong, so I'm going to go searching for a rationalization," right?
That's not the case at all. I've raised arguments that appeal to technical people in the past, and users like rayiner jump in with a claim that "common people" just don't care about technical stuff. Now I'm using arguments that appeal to the aforementioned "common people," and you're jumping in to say they aren't technical enough :-).
Moreover, I was responding to your specific claim that "it's unreasonable to expect that you will remain unseen when walking through a public park."
I'm not interested in doing that hard philosophical work ... but I don't think it's impossible to come up with a reasonably sound proof.
I don't expect to conclude the privacy and surveillance debate once and for all in this thread. No doubt Bruce Schneier, the EFF, and others are way ahead of us on formalizing the best arguments.
> By the way, would you still call it harassment if you never got in the way of the person you were following, never acknowledged your presence, and generally let them go about their business while you were busily recording everything they did? Most people would still be very unhappy.
> By the way, would you still call it harassment if you never got in the way of the person you were following, never acknowledged your presence, and generally let them go about their business while you were busily recording everything they did? Most people would still be very unhappy.
Google "paparazzi". Notice the distinctions between a legal claim of privacy intrusion and the legal claim of harassment. And also, notice the legal claim of freedom of the press.
Your model of "people with cameras following you around" might sound really novel and clever to you, but we've had such people for a long time. And guess what? In public, no one considers it a privacy intrusion. It's harassment.
> Now I'm using arguments that appeal to the aforementioned "common people," and you're jumping in to say they aren't technical enough
Technical arguments are not philosophical arguments. Believe it or not, programmers do not have a monopoly on The Right Way To Do Everything. A philosophical argument can depend too much on jargon and be perverted by political spin, this is true. But you can still methodically break it down and explain it to a non-technical person if you've put it together well.
Wrong. Anonymity is a form of privacy, and it's often one of the things that people who become famous miss the most.
The simple fact that it can be stripped from some (who are famous) and retained by others (who are not famous) even when they are both in the exact same public space means that some people (i.e. the non-famous) have a reasonable expectation of anonymity in public - which is to say, a certain form of privacy - where the famous do not.
And that's not the only fault with the "you have no reasonable privacy in public" line of thought when it comes from people who say that technological advances have, in effect, made us all famous. The assertion is valid only if reasonable expectations are limited by what is and is not technically possible, which is not the case. In truth, we need a sense of privacy to function as free humans. You can't have a working democracy without it. To the extent that it's reasonable to expect whatever level of privacy a functioning government of the people, by the people, and for the people requires, you maintain a reasonable expectation even when advancing technology renders you vulnerable.
Ultimately, the thing that keeps people from kicking in our doors isn't the thickness of our doors, but the strength of the laws that restrain those who would do the kicking.
To date, we've been able to rely on technical hurdles to protect our absolutely essential sense of privacy. If technological advance means those days are behind us, then we need the law to do what previously it didn't have to deal with doing. That transition still needs to happen. But at no point in the course of this transition does the reasonable expectation itself go away. Indeed, it becomes even stronger no that it can no longer be taken for granted.
If you're in public, you have no expectation of privacy.
People keep saying that in this debate, as if it's some sort of self-evident principle that must not be questioned, but is it anything more than a meaningless tautology? Aren't you in public by definition in places where you have no privacy? If so, then being in public is defined by how we define privacy.
The public/private distinction has never been absolute, such that everything about you and what you're doing is either in public or in private at any given time. We're sharing our thoughts on a public forum on the Internet, but at least one of us is physically sitting in his own home while doing so. I have different expectations of privacy for what I'm saying on HN vs. the conversation I just had with someone in this room.
The lines are similarly blurred if we go out. For example, in most jurisdictions you do not give up all rights to privacy just because you went out your front door. If a guy follows you around with a video camera and tries to watch you enter security details when you're paying for stuff at a shop, he's probably going to get in trouble. If a public venue installs video cameras in its bathrooms or changing rooms, it's probably going to get in trouble. If some pervert tries to film up your or your wife's/sister's/daughter's skirt, he's probably going to get in a lot of trouble. These things are all easily possible with technology, and all happen in a "public place", yet I think almost everyone would still consider them unacceptable invasions of privacy and the law in many places would prohibit such behaviour.
Maybe as technology that can be used for surveillance and data mining evolves, we need to evolve our understanding of what should be considered private as well, in order to maintain effective protection of the same underlying values. If metadata alone can now be used to determine sensitive details about us that we would consider to be private if collected directly, then perhaps the collection and use of that metadata should be controlled in the same ways as direct collection and use of the implicit data. If sensitive data is collected for one purpose with consent but can now be repurposed more easily for additional uses, maybe there need to be explicit safeguards to control that risk.
There is a long history of pubic photography (and longer history of painting public scenes). So there is that tradition of photography and absence of an expectation of privacy in public paces (sometimes there are restrictions on commercialization of such images); private areas such as commercial spaces are not 'public' and they have some discretion on what goes/does not go. Taking lewd pictures of people is covered by a different section of the law --usually state laws or local laws.
Taking creepshots is totally divorced from the private/public issue. It's kind of like trying to make S&M into a private/public debate.
Maybe it's time for a new Constitution amendment then. In a world where surveillance is so pervasive, and so potentially dangerous, the laws should be updated, if the old ones aren't sufficient to provide people the privacy they need in a democracy.
The impact of unchecked surveillance, like bad security, is impossibly difficult to quantify until shit hits the fan long enough for it to inconvenience people. Furthermore it's simple and easy to dismiss serious problems as exceptions to the rule, for example Snowden was branded as "very smart" after there were claims that a "high school dropout" evaded NSA's internal security systems and successfully escaped to Hong Kong.
If there are egregious violations of privacy and freedom then we won't be seeing the admissions of guilt/reform, but instead we'll be seeing recriminations and diversions. There needs to be punitive measures in place to deter that kind of negligence and recklessness, in addition to the punishment for actual violations.
Rehabilitation and recidivism are very serious issues that need to be focused on, especially because those who disregard privacy will do so on an ideological level -- it's part of their personal belief system.
An amendment would be nice though I'd settle for a lesser law to resolve these issues as well. Whatever can get it done.
Seems to me there are a number of legal bugs where our laws fall apart at scale. The 2nd amendment is all well and good (my opinion) but arms tech scaled way beyond anything imaginable at the time and some line needed to be drawn on what qualified. Privacy law is having a similar issue as society shifts all its important data to digital storage and into third parties. Who could've imagined that centuries past?
As a programmer it makes me wonder what the common anti patterns of law are.
would only work if you, the people, would make the laws. but since that's not the case anymore all these clueless law makers would shoot themselves in the foot.
More like shoot us in the foot. They will surely have been incentivised by the relevant parties to leave gaping loopholes allowing said relevant parties to continue doing what they're doing.
Third party doctrine cuts deep. See Couch v. US, 409 U.S. 322, 335 ("there can be little expectation of privacy where records are handed to an accountant..."). For example, all the prosecuting of banks and big corps that the Daily Show cheers on depends quite heavily on investigators having access to third-party accounting and financial records. The doctrine might need to be reformed, but it's a monumental task touching many areas and longstanding practices.
For example, all the prosecuting of banks and big corps that the Daily Show cheers on depends quite heavily on investigators having access to third-party accounting and financial records.
Even a light reading of the Corporate personhood page on WP would have told you that the issue is much more complex than that knee-jerk reaction. For example, the courts ruled they can't invoke the Fifth.
I think there were laws broken, though. It is my understanding that the NSA was restricted to spying on foreign targets, and not supposed to be collecting data of any sort on Americans domestic phone calls. Of course, the laws a purposefully kept complex and plenty of loopholes are snuck in, so I may be missing somthing.
–John Oliver of the Daily Show on the NSA spying scandal