Recent technologies, computer networks, world wide web, from surveillance cameras, leading to an extension of the public space in the following sense: information about the people who in the past were known only by the few (close friends and family) today are becoming accessible to virtually anyone is interested to find out. This enlargement raise questions from the perspective of classical liberal theory in the public-private distinction that plays an important role. For example, Judith n. Shklar in "Liberalism of Fear," writes:
Liberalism .. < <. as a strictly political theory is not necessarily linked to any one religious or scientific doctrines, though it is psychologically more compatible with some rather than with others. It must reject only those political doctrines that do not recognize Abraham difference between spheres of the personal and the public. Because of the primacy of toleration as the irreducible limit on public agents, liberals must always draw such a line. This is not historically has permanently or unalterable boundary, but it does require that every public policy be considered with this separation in mind and be consciously defended as meeting the most stringent current standard STI.
The important point for liberalism is not so much where the line is drawn, as that it must be drawn, and that it must under no circumstances be ignored or forgotten. The limits of coercion begin, though they do not end with a prohibition upon invading the private realm, which originally was a matter of religious faith, but which has changed and will go on changing as objects of belief and the sense of privacy alter in response to the technological and military character of governments and the productive relationships that prevail. It is a shifting online, but not erasable one year, and it leaves liberals free to espouse a very large range of philosophical and religious beliefs. > >
How do I apply liberal theory at the new context is not obvious. Liberal public/private distinction makes sense from the perspective of physical property rights, while recent technological evolution e understood rather of withdrawing public/secret, referring to information. The situation we face is not that of private property in favour of the extension of public ownership, as well as about the inability of individuals to maintain, as until now, different identities adapted to a context or another of their lives. For example, employers take into account your Facebook photos with the employee at a drunken party X from last summer (posted by his friends); insurance companies will have access to your entire medical history (which supposedly would be confidential); undemocratic governments seeps out social networks and traficant aresteaza mediate opozantii before they go to do great work; democratic governments collect personal data in order to improve social protection and citizens ' security, but cannot guarantee that such data are used (with or without the agreement of the institutions) for other purposes.
Paul Ohm in "Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization" argues that maintaining the secret of private data is technically impossible and unrealistic. To guarantee the confidentiality of personal data under contract would be able to be a promise that can't be done in good faith. And public policies related to information technologies must also consider this. And the idea of giving people "copyright" over their personal data might not be the optimal approach.
That would be the problem if all the information would be publicly available? James Grimmelmann, in "Accidental Privacy Spills" makes the following remark:
On a technical < < level, privacy and copyright isomorphic has problems. Information is to be shared with certain people and not with others. From this observation have come some interesting ideas. … But this overlap has unfortunate consequences, as well, because many people's ethical intuitions cut very differently across these two problems. The technically consistent pair of responses to them may feel wildly inconsistent as a matter of right and wrong. If credit-card databases were trivially available on major BitTorrent trackers, how many people who now believe in file-sharing would demand complete ban on BitTorrent?
The conventional distinction between privacy and copyright is that the information is used in different ways. Copyright rampant tend to involve many individuals violating the rights of a few large entities; Privacy often rampant reverse this picture. This asymmetry makes it possible to enforce privacy protections. You could stop the NSA in its tracks by prohibiting them from maintaining the wrong sort of database. You could go out, find major commercial violators, and slap them with big fines. The traditional privacy invader invades privacy wholeseale; "copyright infringement" today often connotes something much more individualistic. > >
Friday, March 5, and Bobby Cardwell Valentine talking about possible negative consequences of the impossibility of maintaining personal data secret secret-both towards Governments and private organizations face (whether commercial or non-profit, e.g. religious) and about the effects of generalization of surveillance technologies.
Texts:
Paul Ohm, "Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization", excerpt
David Brin The Transparent Society "(optional)
