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Privacy in the world of [Google Glass] and wearable computing . . . and wifi, apparently
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Actually, no, it's not, just as an aviation corridor over your house is not 'in your air'. It's funny how techies love to argue that the Internet is a separate reality when it benefits them, only to happily argue for an intermingled scenario when that becomes advantageous.
As far as personal privacy versus copyright infringement goes, specifically talking about things like auto-blur, I have no problem at all with something that obscures faces by default (I like the email notification thing, though I can see it potentially resulting in such a flood of emails that it becomes practically unmanageable), but completely ignores copyrighted works. If Disney wants to get pissy because some photo on the internet shows Cinderella in the background, they can worry about it themselves. Google (or whoever) should absolutely not do the legwork for them. If this means that copyright holders need to rethink their distribution models in order to combat increased ease in piracy due to shit like Google Glass, so be it. The world shouldn't revolve around their desire to get a nickel every time someone says "Mickey Mouse".
Oh, and going back to the "wouldn't it suck if you weren't sure if someone was paying attention to you or paying attention to sports scores," I'd think it would be pretty obvious. If you're looking at your Google Glass screen, it's going to be noticeable from the way your eyes are pointing, or in where they're focusing. More generally, though, if the person you're talking to is an asshole who pretends they're listening, you'll catch them at some point, and then you can call them a fucker and find a better friend. If it's a stranger, then who really cares if they're an asshole? People are assholes all the time in much more obvious ways.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
There is no way this can be a good-faith interpretation of what ELM just said.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
There is no reason to be passive-aggressively hostile in response to what he's saying. Knock it off.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
You're still shifting responsibility, which is the whole issue. You're the person doing the connecting, why shouldn't it be incumbent on you to determine whether or not you have permission?
Also, Google is one of the big reasons piracy is the issue it is today, Jeffe.
That's... that's not shifting responsibility at all. It's only allowing auto-connect if a network explicitly states that it will allow it. It's like saying you can only walk into buildings that explicitly say, "This is a public building, come on in." The default assumption is that you can't connect to the network. That is the exact opposite of shifting responsibility.
And yes, I understand the effects that Google (and the internet in general) has had on piracy. You know another big contributor to piracy? Content providers being retarded about the whole thing. At the end of the day, though, technology and copyrights are going to run up against one another. We can either decide to just stop the advancement of technology, or we can tell content providers to find different business models. While I'm sympathetic to piracy issues, I think that sometimes companies need to suck it up and change with the times.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
What are your thoughts on my picnic example?
If I am having a barbeque in a public park and invited many friends, does the fact that it is in a public space make it acceptable for you to walk over and take an extra hamburger, even if no one notices you do it, because there is a big crowd of invited people?
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
Why not?
Or better yet, if my backyard has no fence and no marker and nothing to indicate it is private (other than it being attached to a house), is it now public property?
If you can smell what I'm making for dinner, does that allow you to come eat without permission?
We live in a society where your shit inevitably gets intermingled with others. There are often no clear borders, delineation, or anything to tell you what's yours but some common sense.
If you are using a WiFi spot without the persons knowledge or consent, you're still using their shit without consent. Just because its a digital presence instead of corporeal doesn't change this fact.
Here's the bottom line: if you didn't set up the router, and if you don't know the person who did, its still bad to use their things without permission. Property and usage rights don't change because it requires someone with decent knowledge to find out if you are or enough knowledge to know their shits insecure. You don't get to drive the old lady's car across the street because her license is revoked, she leaves the keys out, and is so far gone she doesn't even know she has the car anymore.
TLDR taking advantage of other peoples inabilities is wrong regardless if its corporeal or digital.
What possible benefits are there to that?
You've got something which is incredibly easy to protect and in fact advised to do so, people who have a personal belief in providing free wifi, and people who don't care unless it's used illegally or in a way that clearly disrupts their usage.
Locking a door is incredibly easy.
Does someone leaving their door open mean you have permission to sit on the couch and use their tv?
Damn these locked door / open fence / party at a park analogies are getting tortured.
Suffice to say, the existence of a wireless network alone, regardless of it's security level, is not an explicit or implicit invitation to use that wireless network.
Reasonable person test.
Trespassing into a dwelling clearly has other implications that hopping onto someones wifi doesn't.
Non technically inclined people have router. They decide to have technical people in family set it up. They run into issues and internet company tech tells them to hit the reset button. Router drops settings, but they still connect to it. Yes, this does happen, and WRT54G's do it.
Just because setting up a router is easy for a lot of people doesn't mean its easy for everyone. Hell there are people who still can't figure out Windows 8, Windows 7, or even how to send a damn email or bookmark a webpage, or the basic idea of how internet works (my father in law trying to plug his laptop into a phone jack in a cabin 300 miles from their house called me wondering why their internet had been shut off from DOWN HERE).
Its simply the technically inclined taking advantage of the non inclined and telling themselves that a privately purchased router on pricey privately purchased internet is free WiFi, totes.
It gets much worse than that. I am sure that some of the early, popular apps will do some crude form of "x ray vision" by superimposing people on the street's heads on naked bodies in similiar positions.
Of course, you don't need something at that level to create a social problem. All it really takes is a context aware app feeding information based on your conversation, and face to face interactions become that much less personal.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
To someone who knows what they're doing, hopping on to someone's WiFi is an incredibly easy way to commit identity theft.
Reasonable person test? Is that a thing, or a construct used to justify using other peoples shit?
Companies have been changing with the times. The problem is that other companies, like Google, make money from the piracy infrastructure industry, and so they fight any attempt to undermine that money flow tooth and nail. Look up the Annenberg Online Ad Transparency Report to get a look at what is going on behind the scenes.
(Also, I find it telling that it's only content providers who are told to get with the times - when Pandora's business model turned out to be unworkable, there was a lot of support for dropping the statutory rates on the content they were using.)
Some people are fine with it. I'm not particularly.
Please explain to me how the position of "don't go on networks unless you have explicit permission to do so" is unreasonable?
Same non-technically inclined people have empty router named linksys that they get their wireless from. Those people are out and about and poke on their phone and see "linksys available" and they go "oh ok this is how I get to the internet" and connect and use it. Are they doing something wrong? Sure. Are they horrible malicious human beings trying to justify bad behavior? Nope.
If I was in that situation, I would certainly know better, but how does one go about handling that scenario when there might be a large number that don't? The education necessary to explain why it doesn't work like that might also be able to teach them how to secure their own network. This could also be a situation where the picnic in the park example doesn't work as well since that's invoking a different set of shared experiences that explain how to not take a physical object versus the nebulous wireless interwebs.
I would say something about how maybe the default for a wireless router should not be so damned open, but this is where the tech *is* right now, we can't go back and re-educate and re-imagine use cases from the beginning. Really, that distinction sort of takes the wifi example completely out of the conversation. It's an existing tech that was introduced in such a way that causes those scenarios to exist.
How this relates to glass is sort of in the same vein of the lack of education on new technology. Some number of people doing something "wrong" because they don't know better and the technology allows them to versus some number of people who are taking advantage of the technology to do something they know is wrong. The difference is that we're still at the beginning, so we can adjust the expectations of how the tech should work on its own in order to prevent accidental wrongdoing. Those scenarios don't have to happen by default.
paxprank.org | paxcommunity.net | Steam | XBL
The point I saw him trying to make is that wi-fi issues are not direct analogs of picnic baskets or unlocked front doors or whatnot. He gave an example of using SSID devices, which will directly interfere with SSID devices your neighbor might be using. If my neighbor is using a Wavebird controller turned to channel 6, and I turn on a Wavebird and turn it to channel 6, it could screw with his ability to play the game. What are my ethical obligations here? My Wavebird is on my property. It is mine. Yet its effects, by its very nature, affect people in other homes.
Typically, when we talk about property rights, there are two issues that come up. The first is, by using something, am I depriving you of your right to use it,or otherwise tangibly affecting you in a negative way? If your burger is sitting out in public, and I take a bite, I have deprived you of one bite's worth of burger. By using your property, I have made it so that you can't. If I syphon your water, I have deprived you of whatever money that extra water will cost you. I am physically taking something from you.
The second issue is privacy and security. If I walk into your home, even if I don't take anything or break anything, I am infringing upon your sense of security and safety.
Those are generally the reasons why taking other people's stuff, or trespassing on their property, is viewed as bad. Snatching someone's wi-fi is subtly different. What if you have an unlimited data plan, and I know you're away from home and won't be using your network? When I use your wi-fi, assuming I'm not downloading something illicit, does it affect you in any way? No, it actually doesn't. This makes it fundamentally different from the analogies we keep torturing, and I think this is what ELM was getting at. I'm not going onto your property, I'm not depriving you of anything, I'm not affecting your sense of safety or security, and I'm taking advantage of EM radiation that is physically drifting into my living room.
If you're looking for analogies, this strikes me as being like collecting the run-off from your sprinklers as it runs down the gutter past my house, and using it to water my flowers. I'm taking something that came from your property, that you pay for, without asking, but in a way that doesn't affect you at all, and I'm not veering off my property in order to do so. Is it wrong? maybe, but in a non-obvious manner.
I would say it's wrong because you can never be sure that you hopping onto their network is not hurting them. They might have a data cap. They might be home and trying to download something. Because it might negatively affect them, you shouldn't do it, and it's thus immoral. I don't think it's just immoral because it's like eating their burger, though, because that is a really dumb comparison.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
Barring someone access is trivially easy. Outside heavy or illegal use - which yes should be discouraged or punished, it has no appreciable effect, and it limits an area of public benefit for almost no gain.
How is what you're doing hurting or depriving someone of something in a meaningful sense? Very limited dataplans I suppose, but that's going to be absolutely remote as an occurrence.
In NYC or any other dense areas, people leeching off your wifi because of your own technological ignorance means that the service you are paying for can grind to a halt.
Blaming the victim of a theft because they weren't informed enough to tell people not to steal their stuff is idiotic, and I can't believe otherwise intelligent people are holding this position.
And once again, the burden of responsibility shifts. My network, my rules.
It's funny how cavalier people are when they're trying to improve the world with everyone else's work.
A lot of people don't have the bandwidth to support someone else, so you may be making things difficult for them right then to do things like pay bills. Most people don't have things like a 16 meg line, instead something like 1 or 2.
If someone gives you the house key to check their dogs and you throw a huge party there while they're gone (though you clean up and they'll never know), is that an ethical thing?
We can agree on the default router settings. In 99% of cases here, they're going to get on their network as the networks are arranged by signal strength, and they'll recognize the LINKSYS or BELKIN from the box they just got.
But yes, the default router settings these days are horrendous. I've got a higher end wireless router so I'm guessing Cisco figured I knew what I was doing, but if people who don't know jack see the RECOMMENDED FOR thing and media is totally their deal they just...well, they won't know.
The point is that you have no say over how I set up my network, and who I allow on it. It's not your decision to make. And yes, taking that decision from me does negatively impact my sense of security and safety.
Furthermore, as I pointed out earlier, the EM radiation argument is fundamentally flawed, because you don't actually own the spectrum in your house. It would be like me trying to toll planes that fly over my house - I can't do that, because I don't actually own the airspace there.
Given that APs are pretty much all encrypted by default these days, and you have therefore taken steps to allow me to access your network, why should I assume you don't want me to? It's not shifting responsibilities, if you don't want me to cut through your yard, you need to put up fences or no trespassing signs.
Click here for a horrible H/A thread with details.
Because the default assumption of our society is "permission denied except where explicitly granted".
And no, I actually don't have to put up signs and fences, because of that societal assumption. Even in the case of field and stream access, the onus is on you to transit over my land in a manner that is both quick as does as little damage as possible.
This is what I'm talking about really - what you do with the access is what is going to determine whether or not it's ethical. Having your mobile device auto-connect to an open wifi signal as you're walking down the street can't really be counted as an invasion of privacy. It's a very different thing from using this for identity theft or switching to your neighbours network whenever you're downloading a massive file.
I pay for my internet. I literally buy a specific amount of bytes per month I can upload and download. When you connect to my network, you are stealing what I have paid money for. And that's it. It's theft, end of story.
All the arguments against this simple fact are based around the idea that since I made it easy to steal, it's ok. Maybe you should think long and hard about that for a second.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
paxprank.org | paxcommunity.net | Steam | XBL
Part of the issue is that what we consider the "real world" is subdivided in so many ways that most people never see.
How does this relate to Glass? Should it matter whether someone is harmed by your filming of them and uploading that video to an indexed search engine? If so, what degree of harm is necessary?
Personally, I think the tangible harm or degree thereof is not really what is important here. Regardless of whether you are harmed by people the world over searching for you by name and seeing that you just didn't feel like getting dressed and went to Dunkin donuts in your PJs on your day off, it is certainly a major change for people to be able to do so, especially since (in my experience) one of the things you balance before engaging in this type of behavior is the chance of people you know seeing you went out in your PJs. At the least, I think that making a change like this (i.e., making it 100% certain that people you know will see you were lazy that morning) should prompt a discussion about the kind of world we want to live in and whether we think the changes to be made are a net positive.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
Yeah, if I only I had specifically stated that using someone's wi-fi without permission was wrong because of precisely this reason. Oh wait, I did! Wowsers!
To reiterate: it is wrong to use someone's wi-fi without asking, because, whatever other concerns exist, you can never be 100% sure you are not harming them in some way by doing so.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
I'd just like to point out these things are already happening.
The fact that it's not common enough for us to make a huge push to do something about it I'm sure is a huge comfort to those people that happen to be part of the unlucky few.
All those things you mentioned are nice, positive steps. I'd like to see them implemented regardless of Glass.
http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/user/Mort-ZA/
@MortNZ
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
Out of curiosity, what would you say about my run-off water comparison? You water your lawn with water you are paying for. Water runs down the gutter past my house. I collect the water and use it for my plants. Kosher or not? If so, how is it different? If not, why? Also, what about a case where you have an unlimited data plan, and don't pay by the byte?
(And because I'm sure people (read: AH) will bleat about it otherwise, I think it is wrong to use someone's wi-fi network without permission. I am talking about hypothetical situations in which there is no plausible harm that can occur, specifically because I find the ethical discussion interesting.)
Another thing I find interesting is that we have had, numerous times, discussions about the nature of private property and whether or not it exists as a natural right. I know that at least a few people have claimed that no such natural right exists, and that you only get to claim ownership of something if the government says you can, and, further, that such claims to property cease to even make sense without laws and governments to back them up. I'm kind of curious how those arguments, and their arguers, match up against the ideas given here that using something - even something inherently intangible - without permission is always wrong, even if there is no possible harm done.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
That doesn't follow.
Google is a willful exchange of free services for them to use your personal info so they can make their money advertising. If you are cool with it then that's on you. I am not cool with it and its my right to not want to use their services because of this.
So reality basically becomes The Sims with a nude patch modded in.
I'm still not seeing the problem.