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Privacy vs Open Public Data

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Nick Thompson

Privacy vs Open Public Data

Dear all,

We had a discussion last Friday at Friam that I would like to see continued here. Many of us had seen a recent talk in which somebody was using satellite imagery to track an individual through his day. The resolution of such imagery is now down to 20 cm, and that is before processing. We stipulated (not sure it's true in NM) that if I were to follow one of you around for week, never intruding into your private space, but tagging along after you everywhere you went and patiently recording your every public act, that I could eventually be thrown in jail for stalking. We tried to decide what the law should say about assembling public data to create a record of the moment by moment activities of an individual. We suspected that nothing in law would forbid that kind of surveillance, but it made some of us uneasy. So much of what we take to be our private lives, is, after all, just a way of organizing public data.

We then wondered what justified any kind of privacy law. If everybody were honest, the cameras would reveal nothing that everybody would not be happy to have known? Were not privacy concerns proof of guilt? No, we concluded: they might be proof of SHAME, but shame and guilt are not the same, and the law, per se, is not in the business of punishing SHAME.

I thought our discussion was interesting for its combination of technological sophistication and legal naiveté. (In short, we needed a lawyer) In the end I concluded that, as more and more public data is put on line and more and more sophisticated data mining techniques are deployed, there will come a time when a category of cyber-stalking might have to be identified which involves using public data to track and aggregate in detail the movements of a particular individual. Do we have an opinion on this?

We will now be at St. Johns for the foreseeable future.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

http://www.cusf.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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glen ep ropella

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

Nicholas Thompson wrote at 01/15/2013 11:45 AM:
> We then wondered what justified any kind of privacy law. If everybody were
> honest, the cameras would reveal nothing that everybody would not be happy
> to have known? Were not privacy concerns proof of guilt? No, we concluded:
> they might be proof of SHAME, but shame and guilt are not the same, and the
> law, per se, is not in the business of punishing SHAME.

In addition to guilt or shame, there's also what I call the "lurker use
case". In my experiments with social media, I've found that some of my
friends (in real life, not on twitter et al) are inherent lurkers. They
enjoy monitoring my (or anyone's) exploits, but don't publicly
participate ... don't chastise when the subject does something stupid
... don't accolade when the subject does something good ... etc. In
stead, they'll wait until a private interaction to comment, usually
offhandedly. Although I don't really care, I've tried to coerce the
settings on various social media tools (and my phone's GPS/wifi tracker)
so as to prevent (some) lurkers from monitoring me. Lurkers that I
don't meet often face to face don't concern me because I can't control
the experiment.

I'd consider this a valid use case to consider with the government, too.
For example, I don't really care what DISA.mil knows about me. But I
do want to know whatever it is they know about me. 8^) ... without
having to file a FOIA.

To me, this is less about privacy and more about _control_ of
information. But it seems quite distinct from guilt or shame.

--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

On 1/15/13 12:45 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

In the end I concluded that, as more and more public data is put on line and more and more sophisticated data mining techniques are deployed, there will come a time when a category of cyber-stalking might have to be identified which involves using public data to track and aggregate in detail the movements of a particular individual.

It will likely be Google, Amazon, or Facebook, or some other well-organized and well-equipped firm doing the tracking -- just one of thousands of image processing jobs queued-up on their compute farms around the world. Google has their own birds already (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoEye-1). Note that these satellites have more capabilities than is published on the `public' maps.google.com.

Marcus

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Tom Johnson

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Per Nick's fine invitation, see:

http://battellemedia.com/archives/2013/01/facebook-is-no-longer-flat.php

-tom johnson

On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 12:45 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear all,

We had a discussion last Friday at Friam that I would like to see continued here. Many of us had seen a recent talk in which somebody was using satellite imagery to track an individual through his day. The resolution of such imagery is now down to 20 cm, and that is before processing. We stipulated (not sure it's true in NM) that if I were to follow one of you around for week, never intruding into your private space, but tagging along after you everywhere you went and patiently recording your every public act, that I could eventually be thrown in jail for stalking. We tried to decide what the law should say about assembling public data to create a record of the moment by moment activities of an individual. We suspected that nothing in law would forbid that kind of surveillance, but it made some of us uneasy. So much of what we take to be our private lives, is, after all, just a way of organizing public data.

We then wondered what justified any kind of privacy law. If everybody were honest, the cameras would reveal nothing that everybody would not be happy to have known? Were not privacy concerns proof of guilt? No, we concluded: they might be proof of SHAME, but shame and guilt are not the same, and the law, per se, is not in the business of punishing SHAME.

I thought our discussion was interesting for its combination of technological sophistication and legal naiveté. (In short, we needed a lawyer) In the end I concluded that, as more and more public data is put on line and more and more sophisticated data mining techniques are deployed, there will come a time when a category of cyber-stalking might have to be identified which involves using public data to track and aggregate in detail the movements of a particular individual. Do we have an opinion on this?

We will now be at St. Johns for the foreseeable future.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

http://www.cusf.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

==========================================
J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
505.577.6482(c) 505.473.9646(h)
Twitter: jtjohnson

http://www.jtjohnson.com [hidden email]
==========================================

Bruce Sherwood

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

My understanding is that in Japan there is a strong convention of preserving the illusion of privacy even when there is little privacy in fact, in part because of high population density. "Don't look, don't tell". It seems to me that in the brave new electronic world there is and perhaps can be little real privacy, yet it also seems to me that the illusion of privacy is important.

Bruce

Eric Charles

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Nick,
I have struggled with parts of this quite a bit. As you know, I am a somewhat-crazy Libertarian, and so get stuck in conversations like this on a fairly regular basis. In particular, I reject the idea that privacy is primarily about protecting people from shame or guilt. I believe that privacy (of a certain sort) is a basic right that is essential to a free society. Alas, it is difficult to explain why, as whenever I assert the right to not have certain information public, whomever is on the other side of the argument immediately tries to back me into a corner of being ashamed of whatever it is I want to keep private. There are a few things in my life I am indeed ashamed of, but very few, and I would probably tell most of them to anyone who asked. On the other hand, there are many things that I would like to keep private, and would probably not tell anyone who asked. How to explain the difference?

The best I can say, I think, is that I see the right to (mostly) privacy as inextricably linked to the right to (mostly) self-determination. Whether people should have the latter right is certainly up for debate, but I think it has been a cornerstone of US culture through most of US history. At the least, it has been a cornerstone of our social myth structure (for sure if you were a white male, off and on for other groups). The idea that one could get a "fresh start" in America motivated many an immigrant... and part of getting a fresh start was people not knowing everything about you that those you were leaving knew. The mythic Old West was also largely based on such a principle.

The ability to control (to some extent) what people know about you is often key to achieving goals (or at least it seems that way). Imagine for example, the otherwise charismatic man with "a face made for radio." He might or might not be ashamed of his looks, but either way he has an interest in keeping his face (mostly) private until his career is sufficiently established. To put it in a more Victorian tone: There are certain things, we need not say which, that I am not ashamed of, and yet it would be inconvenient if they came out. Of those things we shan't speak, and it should be my prerogative to protect them as I see fit against the inquiries of others.

----------

To complicate your inquiry, one of the big legal issues in the fight you see brewing is this: Most of the new slush of public information you are concerned with is put out their voluntarily. The GPS in your phone turns on and off (and if not, you could get a different phone). Your posts, emails, blog entries, online photos, etc. are all being made public intentionally. Those software and website user agreements few ever reads often include consents to use your data in various ways, including making parts public.

The old ideas of stalking, I think, mostly involved the accumulation of data against the will of the "victim", and could potentially include the gathering of both private and technically public information (i.e., court records). I don't know how you could make a legal case against someone who only knew things about you that you intentionally threw out into the world for the purpose of people knowing it. If you wander around town everyday without clothes on, it would be hard to accuse someone of being a "peeping Tom" just because they saw you naked.

Eric

--------
Eric Charles
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State, Altoona

From: "Nicholas Thompson" <[hidden email]>
To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group" <[hidden email]>
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 2:45:52 PM
Subject: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

Dear all,

We will now be at St. Johns for the foreseeable future.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

http://www.cusf.org

Steve Smith

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

Nick -
Shame and Guilt are definitely implicated in the loss of Privacy, but not the whole story. And the *legal* aspects come *after* the social and the human aspects of the topic.

Eric -
Privacy is a fundamental *need* of humans. I'm not sure where it comes from or what other animals share that need, but it is fundamental and unequivocal for humans, despite many situations where *overt* privacy is highly compromised.

I think the "voluntary" aspect of much of our information exposure is somewhat of a red herring. I do not think most people appreciate how *exposed* their information is. For lots of reasons, we fail to read or ignore EULAs and Service Use Agreements all the time. We don't always appreciate the unexpected ways disparate information about us can be fused to infer new information.

In some ways, saying that we *voluntarily* put our information into the public sphere is a lot like the arguments that women who do not remain fully scarfed in public are inciting sexual violence against them.   Public figures, especially attractive young female entertainers, *know* that Paparazzi with very long lenses are stalking them all of the time. Whether they have anything to be ashamed of or feel guilty about is moot, their nature as public figures in the sightline of public places makes them fair game for such invasions of privacy. It is equally inevitable and unhealthy for stalked and stalker alike IMO.

All -
I think the term *stalking* also carries a connotation of engagement. A stalker who never reveals themselves, nor acts overtly on the knowledge they gained as a stalker is something else... perhaps a voyeur?

I was once a private investigator and my job was, at it's core, to bend the boundaries of people's privacy if not to invade it directly.   I was careful about how far I took it and thoughtful about what I did with what I learned.

I left the profession for many reasons but one issue was that the private things I knew about many people weighed heavily on me. I took at most passing prurient interest in some of these things, and mostly curbed myself from abusing my unwholesome knowledge of others' lives (mostly in the context of conflict of interest when I learned things about my clients or took on clients who I already knew too much about). By the time I left it, I did not respect the profession, even in it's idealized image.

As my wife's tech support, I have access to all of her e-mail and web history. I even set her up with Skype and turned on auto-answer so that she could check in on the dog at home from her smart phone (when she understood the implications of this, she made me turn it off). It is understood between us that I do not abuse the privileges my superior technical position gives me. She also has 30 years of journals shelved within 20 feet of me which I could pull down and read at the drop of the hat. It is important to her well-being that she feel secure in her privacy and it is important to my own emotional health that I not transgress, even if she "would never know".   I'm pretty sure she does not riffle my wallet or backpack or check my phone history, for precisely the same reasons.

I contend that there is as much damage to the invader of privacy as there is to the invaded. Who do we become when we do not respect the boundaries of others? Who are we as a society when we allow or encourage others to transgress? I understand the arguments for Law Enforcement and Intelligence and Security *wanting* to spy on people freely... to restrict the use of cryptography, etc. but they don't outweigh the risk of who we become when we do these things. Unfortunately they really don't ask my opinion, much less permission in such matters. Subsequently I have a lot of mistrust for those apparati.

- Steve

Nick,
I have struggled with parts of this quite a bit. As you know, I am a somewhat-crazy Libertarian, and so get stuck in conversations like this on a fairly regular basis. In particular, I reject the idea that privacy is primarily about protecting people from shame or guilt. I believe that privacy (of a certain sort) is a basic right that is essential to a free society. Alas, it is difficult to explain why, as whenever I assert the right to not have certain information public, whomever is on the other side of the argument immediately tries to back me into a corner of being ashamed of whatever it is I want to keep private. There are a few things in my life I am indeed ashamed of, but very few, and I would probably tell most of them to anyone who asked. On the other hand, there are many things that I would like to keep private, and would probably not tell anyone who asked. How to explain the difference?

The best I can say, I think, is that I see the right to (mostly) privacy as inextricably linked to the right to (mostly) self-determination. Whether people should have the latter right is certainly up for debate, but I think it has been a cornerstone of US culture through most of US history. At the least, it has been a cornerstone of our social myth structure (for sure if you were a white male, off and on for other groups). The idea that one could get a "fresh start" in America motivated many an immigrant... and part of getting a fresh start was people not knowing everything about you that those you were leaving knew. The mythic Old West was also largely based on such a principle.

The ability to control (to some extent) what people know about you is often key to achieving goals (or at least it seems that way). Imagine for example, the otherwise charismatic man with "a face made for radio." He might or might not be ashamed of his looks, but either way he has an interest in keeping his face (mostly) private until his career is sufficiently established. To put it in a more Victorian tone: There are certain things, we need not say which, that I am not ashamed of, and yet it would be inconvenient if they came out. Of those things we shan't speak, and it should be my prerogative to protect them as I see fit against the inquiries of others.

----------

To complicate your inquiry, one of the big legal issues in the fight you see brewing is this: Most of the new slush of public information you are concerned with is put out their voluntarily. The GPS in your phone turns on and off (and if not, you could get a different phone). Your posts, emails, blog entries, online photos, etc. are all being made public intentionally. Those software and website user agreements few ever reads often include consents to use your data in various ways, including making parts public.

The old ideas of stalking, I think, mostly involved the accumulation of data against the will of the "victim", and could potentially include the gathering of both private and technically public information (i.e., court records). I don't know how you could make a legal case against someone who only knew things about you that you intentionally threw out into the world for the purpose of people knowing it. If you wander around town everyday without clothes on, it would be hard to accuse someone of being a "peeping Tom" just because they saw you naked.

Eric

--------
Eric Charles
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State, Altoona

From: "Nicholas Thompson" [hidden email]
To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group" [hidden email]
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 2:45:52 PM
Subject: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

Dear all,

We had a discussion last Friday at Friam that I would like to see continued here. Many of us had seen a recent talk in which somebody was using satellite imagery to track an individual through his day. The resolution of such imagery is now down to 20 cm, and that is before processing. We stipulated (not sure it's true in NM) that if I were to follow one of you around for week, never intruding into your private space, but tagging along after you everywhere you went and patiently recording your every public act, that I could eventually be thrown in jail for stalking. We tried to decide what the law should say about assembling public data to create a record of the moment by moment activities of an individual. We suspected that nothing in law would forbid that kind of surveillance, but it made some of us uneasy. So much of what we take to be our private lives, is, after all, just a way of organizing public data.

We then wondered what justified any kind of privacy law. If everybody were honest, the cameras would reveal nothing that everybody would not be happy to have known? Were not privacy concerns proof of guilt? No, we concluded: they might be proof of SHAME, but shame and guilt are not the same, and the law, per se, is not in the business of punishing SHAME.

I thought our discussion was interesting for its combination of technological sophistication and legal naiveté. (In short, we needed a lawyer) In the end I concluded that, as more and more public data is put on line and more and more sophisticated data mining techniques are deployed, there will come a time when a category of cyber-stalking might have to be identified which involves using public data to track and aggregate in detail the movements of a particular individual. Do we have an opinion on this?

We will now be at St. Johns for the foreseeable future.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

http://www.cusf.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Steve Smith

FRIAM: The Comic Edition!

Apologies to ...

well...

ALL of you, but Doug in particular!

and special thanks to Josh for the inspiration.

Steve Smith

Re: FRIAM: The Comic Edition!

Redux:

Apologies to ...

well...

ALL of you, but Doug in particular!

and special thanks to Josh for the inspiration.

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

On 1/15/13 10:54 PM, Steve Smith wrote:

Who do we become when we do not respect the boundaries of others? Who are we as a society when we allow or encourage others to transgress? I understand the arguments for Law Enforcement and Intelligence and Security *wanting* to spy on people freely... to restrict the use of cryptography, etc. but they don't outweigh the risk of who we become when we do these things.

When a person visits the doctor, information shared is privileged. If the doctor does not treat it as such, the doctor's career is put at risk. It's a good incentive to keep quiet.

So imagine a world in which brain scans become much more sophisticated, and that certain dangerous mental health problems could be diagnosed with high accuracy, and also treated. Because of fear of mass shootings, etc., Americans make it law that scans be done on all, and that appropriate treatments be employed. For the sake of argument, suppose it's all handled methodically and in a secure fashion.

Should we expect that the therapists and psychiatrists involved in this hypothetical process would suffer themselves for not respecting boundaries of individuals' psychological spaces? In current practice they would be invited inside the boundary by the patient and so presumably that's different. I think it is an adjustment health providers would make without much trouble. It would be a professional analytical activity.

Marcus

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Douglas Roberts-2

Re: FRIAM: The Comic Edition!

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

Why do I feel that another blog post is about to be posted?

Thanks, Steve!

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 12:42 AM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Redux:

Apologies to ...

well...

ALL of you, but Doug in particular!

and special thanks to Josh for the inspiration.

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

--
Doug Roberts
[hidden email]
[hidden email]

http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins

505-455-7333 - Office
505-672-8213 - Mobile

Eric Charles

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

Marcus,
This is the perfect example of where privacy and self-determination collide. To avoid arguing about the brain in particular, lets assume it was a whole body scan, and that somehow it could pick up on whatever variables someone cares to bring into the discussion. Still, it would not be able to tell you with perfect accuracy who was going to be violent. At best it would be able to tell you "This person will be violent if they find themselves in the following quite specific conditions....."

The problem is that this still doesn't tell us what to do. Do we "treat the person" or "treat the condition"? What if the person is already successfully treating the conditions?

For example, how long did Bruce Banner go without incident before S.H.I.E.L.D. sent Black Widow to pull him back in? Who's the monster now? Well, Nick (Fury), who's the monster now?

That is somewhat serious.

If we find out that someone will become violent in a very particular situation, and the person is aware of their problem and has successfully avoided those situations for quite a while... on what basis could we claim the right to force them into some sort of treatment... no matter how successful it is. There are quite a wide varieties of lives that people can live, this includes lives spent as a hermit, lives spent smoking pot, etc. There will never be a way to use a body scan to determine with certainty that there will be future violence in a particular person's particular life.* If a person has not publicly displayed a violent tendency, it seems to me that they have a right to keep the so-called tendency private, and that this has potentially quite important consequences for their ability to pursue a chosen path as they see fit.

Eric

*Unless of course we can scan them in the middle of a violent act, while we have some knowledge of how their environment will continue in the immediate future. But that is a special and not particularly interesting case.

--------
Eric Charles
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State, Altoona

From: "Marcus G. Daniels" <[hidden email]>
To: [hidden email]
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 3:36:08 AM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

On 1/15/13 10:54 PM, Steve Smith wrote:

Who do we become when we do not respect the boundaries of others? Who are we as a society when we allow or encourage others to transgress? I understand the arguments for Law Enforcement and Intelligence and Security *wanting* to spy on people freely... to restrict the use of cryptography, etc. but they don't outweigh the risk of who we become when we do these things.

Owen Densmore

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

Administrator

In reply to this post by Tom Johnson

Is the graph search limited to facebook data? Or does it include the rest of other search engine data? If just FB then it may have the problem the author discusses .. needing a constant stream of new activity from which to infer the graph.

At a guess, I'd say twitter is a better source and much more graph-able .. almost a tripple-store with hashtags and @ identifiers.

I've noticed that people tend to migrate toward/between one of G+, Facebook, and Twitter rather than use all of them so FB may be right to try to get folks back into the herd.

-- Owen

On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 1:32 PM, Tom Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Per Nick's fine invitation, see:

http://battellemedia.com/archives/2013/01/facebook-is-no-longer-flat.php

-tom johnson

On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 12:45 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear all,

We had a discussion last Friday at Friam that I would like to see continued here. Many of us had seen a recent talk in which somebody was using satellite imagery to track an individual through his day. The resolution of such imagery is now down to 20 cm, and that is before processing. We stipulated (not sure it's true in NM) that if I were to follow one of you around for week, never intruding into your private space, but tagging along after you everywhere you went and patiently recording your every public act, that I could eventually be thrown in jail for stalking. We tried to decide what the law should say about assembling public data to create a record of the moment by moment activities of an individual. We suspected that nothing in law would forbid that kind of surveillance, but it made some of us uneasy. So much of what we take to be our private lives, is, after all, just a way of organizing public data.

We then wondered what justified any kind of privacy law. If everybody were honest, the cameras would reveal nothing that everybody would not be happy to have known? Were not privacy concerns proof of guilt? No, we concluded: they might be proof of SHAME, but shame and guilt are not the same, and the law, per se, is not in the business of punishing SHAME.

I thought our discussion was interesting for its combination of technological sophistication and legal naiveté. (In short, we needed a lawyer) In the end I concluded that, as more and more public data is put on line and more and more sophisticated data mining techniques are deployed, there will come a time when a category of cyber-stalking might have to be identified which involves using public data to track and aggregate in detail the movements of a particular individual. Do we have an opinion on this?

We will now be at St. Johns for the foreseeable future.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

http://www.cusf.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

--
==========================================
J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
<a href="tel:505.577.6482" value="+15055776482" target="_blank">505.577.6482(c) <a href="tel:505.473.9646" value="+15054739646" target="_blank">505.473.9646(h)
Twitter: jtjohnson

http://www.jtjohnson.com [hidden email]
==========================================

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Owen Densmore

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

Administrator

In reply to this post by Eric Charles

Eric: one of the difficulties of the free society approach, to which I agree btw, is that we migrate between countries so easily nowadays, so that privacy is global, not national. Certainly laws cannot be easily crafted to handle national differences.

On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 9:40 PM, Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,
I have struggled with parts of this quite a bit. As you know, I am a somewhat-crazy Libertarian, and so get stuck in conversations like this on a fairly regular basis. In particular, I reject the idea that privacy is primarily about protecting people from shame or guilt. I believe that privacy (of a certain sort) is a basic right that is essential to a free society. Alas, it is difficult to explain why, as whenever I assert the right to not have certain information public, whomever is on the other side of the argument immediately tries to back me into a corner of being ashamed of whatever it is I want to keep private. There are a few things in my life I am indeed ashamed of, but very few, and I would probably tell most of them to anyone who asked. On the other hand, there are many things that I would like to keep private, and would probably not tell anyone who asked. How to explain the difference?

The best I can say, I think, is that I see the right to (mostly) privacy as inextricably linked to the right to (mostly) self-determination. Whether people should have the latter right is certainly up for debate, but I think it has been a cornerstone of US culture through most of US history. At the least, it has been a cornerstone of our social myth structure (for sure if you were a white male, off and on for other groups). The idea that one could get a "fresh start" in America motivated many an immigrant... and part of getting a fresh start was people not knowing everything about you that those you were leaving knew. The mythic Old West was also largely based on such a principle.

The ability to control (to some extent) what people know about you is often key to achieving goals (or at least it seems that way). Imagine for example, the otherwise charismatic man with "a face made for radio." He might or might not be ashamed of his looks, but either way he has an interest in keeping his face (mostly) private until his career is sufficiently established. To put it in a more Victorian tone: There are certain things, we need not say which, that I am not ashamed of, and yet it would be inconvenient if they came out. Of those things we shan't speak, and it should be my prerogative to protect them as I see fit against the inquiries of others.

----------

To complicate your inquiry, one of the big legal issues in the fight you see brewing is this: Most of the new slush of public information you are concerned with is put out their voluntarily. The GPS in your phone turns on and off (and if not, you could get a different phone). Your posts, emails, blog entries, online photos, etc. are all being made public intentionally. Those software and website user agreements few ever reads often include consents to use your data in various ways, including making parts public.

The old ideas of stalking, I think, mostly involved the accumulation of data against the will of the "victim", and could potentially include the gathering of both private and technically public information (i.e., court records). I don't know how you could make a legal case against someone who only knew things about you that you intentionally threw out into the world for the purpose of people knowing it. If you wander around town everyday without clothes on, it would be hard to accuse someone of being a "peeping Tom" just because they saw you naked.

Eric

--------
Eric Charles
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State, Altoona

From: "Nicholas Thompson" <[hidden email]>
To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group" <[hidden email]>
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 2:45:52 PM
Subject: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

Dear all,

We had a discussion last Friday at Friam that I would like to see continued here. Many of us had seen a recent talk in which somebody was using satellite imagery to track an individual through his day. The resolution of such imagery is now down to 20 cm, and that is before processing. We stipulated (not sure it's true in NM) that if I were to follow one of you around for week, never intruding into your private space, but tagging along after you everywhere you went and patiently recording your every public act, that I could eventually be thrown in jail for stalking. We tried to decide what the law should say about assembling public data to create a record of the moment by moment activities of an individual. We suspected that nothing in law would forbid that kind of surveillance, but it made some of us uneasy. So much of what we take to be our private lives, is, after all, just a way of organizing public data.

We then wondered what justified any kind of privacy law. If everybody were honest, the cameras would reveal nothing that everybody would not be happy to have known? Were not privacy concerns proof of guilt? No, we concluded: they might be proof of SHAME, but shame and guilt are not the same, and the law, per se, is not in the business of punishing SHAME.

I thought our discussion was interesting for its combination of technological sophistication and legal naiveté. (In short, we needed a lawyer) In the end I concluded that, as more and more public data is put on line and more and more sophisticated data mining techniques are deployed, there will come a time when a category of cyber-stalking might have to be identified which involves using public data to track and aggregate in detail the movements of a particular individual. Do we have an opinion on this?

We will now be at St. Johns for the foreseeable future.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
http://www.cusf.org

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Owen Densmore

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

Administrator

Re: satellites: they have very high resolution but I'm not sure they have a high frame rate .. ie could "track" an individual.

-- Owen

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

On 1/16/13 9:19 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:

Re: satellites: they have very high resolution but I'm not sure they have a high frame rate .. ie could "track" an individual.

Main limitation is the sun-synchronous orbit -- limited time to see a target as it comes in and out of view.

http://launch.geoeye.com/LaunchSite/about/

" GeoEye-2's optical telescope, detectors, focal plane assemblies and high-speed digital processing electronics are capable of processing 1,300 million pixels per second at a 24,000 line per second rate."

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Nick Thompson

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Eric Charles

Dear Eric,

I am deeply suspicious of “rights-talk”. “Rights” talk is “obligations-talk” or it is nothing. So whenever somebody claims a right for themselves, they have to state it in terms of obligations on me and on us. What does your right to do obligate ME to not do. If I am to be obligated to NOT do something I might like to do (wire your phone to hear you talking to your stockbroker, or pimp, say) I have to have some benefit. And if society is to go to the extra trouble to enforce your right against my temptation, society as a whole (WETF that is) has to have an incentive. Like most libertarian responses, yours largely leaves those two sides of the discussion. You are believers in Natural Right, which I think makes you believers in God, or incoherent. Lockeans you are not.

On the other hand, I admired your whole thing about the Frontier and Second Chances. We are, by immigration, probably a nation of former thieves, cutpurses, embezzlers, for whom the choice was the docks or the stocks. But isn’t that shame? The crime was picking the pocket; the SHAME is having been conficted of having picked a pocket. Why not tell Mrs. Jones as you come in to fix her pipes, “Yes I did 10 years for aggravated burglary and I am proud of it?” There is a very nervous making article in the current new Yorker about a guy who has, in fact, never committed a crime, but who has been in jail for 20 years or so because he seems like the sort of guy who might commit a crime. And what, on the other hand, about all the “second chances” those Priests got.

And yes I think we have to consider a new crime. The crime of stalking by using aggregated public data.

Nick

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 9:40 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

--------
Eric Charles
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State, Altoona

Dear all,

We will now be at St. Johns for the foreseeable future.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

http://www.cusf.org

Nick Thompson

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

Marcus,

Have a look in the new New Yorker about the article on the new civil commitment laws re sexual deviants.

I can both not want these folks living down the block AND be horrified by what We The People are doing to them. It is the luxury of liberalism to be ambivalent.

It’s all very VERY hard.

Nick

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 1:36 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

On 1/15/13 10:54 PM, Steve Smith wrote:

Who do we become when we do not respect the boundaries of others? Who are we as a society when we allow or encourage others to transgress? I understand the arguments for Law Enforcement and Intelligence and Security *wanting* to spy on people freely... to restrict the use of cryptography, etc. but they don't outweigh the risk of who we become when we do these things.

Douglas Roberts-2

Re: Privacy vs Open Public Data

I recently accidentally discovered that a musician friend of mine was a registered sex offender of little girls. I discovered this while using Google to find his phone number to arrange a gig.

Talk about feeling conflicted.

--Doug

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 10:34 AM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Marcus,

Have a look in the new New Yorker about the article on the new civil commitment laws re sexual deviants.

I can both not want these folks living down the block AND be horrified by what We The People are doing to them. It is the luxury of liberalism to be ambivalent.

It’s all very VERY hard.

Nick

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 1:36 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Privacy vs Open Public Data

On 1/15/13 10:54 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
Who do we become when we do not respect the boundaries of others? Who are we as a society when we allow or encourage others to transgress? I understand the arguments for Law Enforcement and Intelligence and Security *wanting* to spy on people freely... to restrict the use of cryptography, etc. but they don't outweigh the risk of who we become when we do these things.

When a person visits the doctor, information shared is privileged. If the doctor does not treat it as such, the doctor's career is put at risk. It's a good incentive to keep quiet.

So imagine a world in which brain scans become much more sophisticated, and that certain dangerous mental health problems could be diagnosed with high accuracy, and also treated. Because of fear of mass shootings, etc., Americans make it law that scans be done on all, and that appropriate treatments be employed. For the sake of argument, suppose it's all handled methodically and in a secure fashion.

Should we expect that the therapists and psychiatrists involved in this hypothetical process would suffer themselves for not respecting boundaries of individuals' psychological spaces? In current practice they would be invited inside the boundary by the patient and so presumably that's different. I think it is an adjustment health providers would make without much trouble. It would be a professional analytical activity.

Marcus

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--
Doug Roberts
[hidden email]
[hidden email]

http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins

505-455-7333 - Office
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Nick Thompson

Re: FRIAM: The Comic Edition!

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

This one of those moments in my life with FRIAM that I live for. A series of communications in which I have not an effing clue what any of you are talking about.

Some of you have, in the past, been good at doing translations between Thompson-speak and the worst excesses of Friam=speak. Can anybody translate in the other direction?

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 12:43 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FRIAM: The Comic Edition!

Redux:

Apologies to ...
well...
ALL of you, but Doug in particular!
and special thanks to Josh for the inspiration.

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