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Privacy in the world of [Google Glass] and wearable computing . . . and wifi, apparently
Posts
No, "privacy" is a term I use to mean something that isn't any of your goddamn business.
"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
Its the sorting and searching methods that have changed the equation. Look at the Boston bombings. It took them a day or two to piece together the identities of the bombers. 5 years ago it would have taken a team of people weeks to pore over all the footage from disparate security systems and piece things together bit by bit. Both crowd sourcing and more automation have turned that job into a matter of hours.
the biggest protection in 99% of the time nobody gives a fuck and law enforcement isn't going to bother
Then you clearly don't meet the "all too often" criteria then, eh?
If you're in public you don't have the right to tell me something isn't my business. Rather, you do, but I'll totally ignore it. It's in public, and I (not me, just giving an example) will do whatever I want and you have no power other than going into your home or some other private location I can't enter. Zero power.
And that protection is exactly what Glass is designed to erode. . .
"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
You're actually right.
99% of the time, nobody gives a shit. Nobody cares if your Facebook shows you covered in sharpie, passed out or something.
But that 1% of the time...whooboy. The dad that just found out his son was marching with his boyfriend in the Pride parade? The mine boss who just saw his employee at a United Mine Worker's meeting? The woman who was filmed heading into the Planned Parenthood clinic?
That's where the problems are.
Shit - we had a teacher getting fired a week or two ago because her mother's obituary named her and her partner. We've got kids being bullied until they commit suicide.
Most of the time nobody cares, but the pressure and issues the times someone does aren't a good thing that justifies 'totally open society'. There is a reason that there are different standards for publishing things about public figures and normal people.
So, in short, you're the modern incarnation of the neighborhood gossip?
I said not myself. Considering how introverted I am IRL I definitely am not referring to myself. I go out of my way to avoid people in my office, for example.
I'm not saying my example was of a good person. I was just pointing out how little you can do about things like that even today. Glass won't change that. If someone wants to be an asshole they just will.
Actually you do. Because 99% of the time it's either obvious when someone is eavesdropping or you don't know the person and it doesn't matter or you can't record it for later dissemination/analysis or some combination of the above. Try whiping out a recording device or leaning in towards someone's conversation and you will see a reaction to your invasion of their privacy.
Given these answers though, you mostly seem like a creepy stalker who thinks anyone's conversation is his business. So ... yeah, good luck with that.
And quite often, there are repercussions for being an asshole. Neighborhood gossips aren't well regarded, for one example.
Being in a public space doesn't mean you aren't entitled to privacy. You seem entirely incapable of understanding the dichotomy between public space and privacy therein. You can't just walk into a restaurant and start filming someone's business lunch with a camcorder. Google Glass makes it hard, if not impossible, to determine when a violation of privacy is occurring. This is the whole point of the discussion, and you're dismissing the point outright.
Okay, based on this reply on the one above it I need to clarify. All I'm doing is supporting Glass and talking about how the privacy concerns are not real. Nothing more. I do not want anything specific to happen. Ever situation I've posted is something real that COULD happen today.
Yeah, you're right, gossips aren't well regarded, and some idiot going around asking if you saw such and such doing that hilariously embarrassing thing on Glass will be equally looked down upon. People should just, by default, leave other people alone.
Ooooh you chastised me for my morals, I feel so dirty.
I'm just telling you what is normal. Which is a big part of where morals come from and end up going. If you want to actually debate the morality, we can. No one is hurting you when they violate your privacy. They're hurting you when you're hurt. If credit and payment systems had better methods of authentication (which they should), then I wouldn't care one bit who knew my social security number. Most of the time, someone is leveraging a misguided belief in an ideal of "privacy" in order to get what they want or avoid doing what they should do on an unrelated issue.
It bothers me how many people invent their own version of the idea of privacy.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
I can do any of that with a phone right now. I guarantee you I could be in the same restaurant as you and record damn near everything about you and you would have no idea at all. Glass. Changes. Nothing.
Not to mention in your example the diner could just complain to the manager and have the recording person removed because it isn't PUBLIC property. Which was the basis for every point I've made.
If the privacy concerns we have are not real, how is it we have them? You have a perception of privacy that is obviously not the majority opinion. You're going to have to elaborate on how it is that all our concerns aren't really anything to be concerned about.
And even if people who are "Google Gossips" (a term I'm coining now) are supposed to be shunned, the information they share is out there, and even if it's not supposed to be kosher, people can't just ignore the information available to them.
Privacy concerns emerge when obtaining the information was illegitimate - where there's an expectation of privacy. And Google Glass doesn't do anything in this area that a lapel pin spy camera you could buy off the back of a comic book 40 years ago changes doesn't. Secret cameras aren't new.
Correlating legitimate information doesn't introduce legitimate privacy concerns either because in order for information to be illegitimately obtained at that point the basis for your search would need to be illegitimate/non-public (so the violation already exists) or the results would need to be illegitimate/non-public (so the violation already existed).
Privacy has its place, but conflating it with a right to be publicly anonymous or for absolute control over any data about you is fundamentally inconsistent with a society with Free Expression, accountability or transparency and creates a comical strawman for legitimate privacy concerns.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Wow. That seems remarkably backward.
Woudn't you rather live in a world where your hobbies lacked those connotations due to the fact that anyone else who liked them wasn't ashamed of them either? Like maybe it would blow your mind to find out that other people you respect actually enjoy the same things as you, but they were also afraid of being considered geeks or whatever, so they kept them hidden too.
I'm with @spacekungfuman on two counts. I already think we're a shittier society for our proliferation of smartphones, especially coupled with social media. I don't think we should go even further into the cave. But that's another argument altogether.
Second, I think we have a right to choose how we define ourselves in different contexts. I, for example, lead wildly different lives depending on context (let's say school versus open mics). It's not deceptive if my professors don't know about my hobbies, nor is it deceptive if my friends don't know about my academic work. It can be used for deception, yeah, but otherwise it is a wonderful, wonderful freedom, and to get rid of it would ruin exploration of one's self.
We both live in the real world. While that would be nice, I'm not going to be the one who pays the cost to fight for that particular change in the world, and it isn't fair to force people to do so.
"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
While secret cameras aren't new, they've always had a lack of legitimacy - hence why they are always concealed. Glass is aimed at changing that - look at how many people are saying that the people with issues over Glass usage need to just accept the "new normal" in this thread alone. As for accountability and transparency, there's a good discussion to be had that our popular concepts of both are woefully incorrect, but that's a topic for another thread.
I don't understand what you mean.
I didn't chastise you at all - I find GPS tagging children, sans a good reason for doing so, to be distasteful and harmful to the child. My point is that behavior only becomes acceptable if we let it.
I disagree in the strongest terms possible. When you are in public, there is an expectation that your actions are public, but only to that audience. Even if someone wants to spread what they saw, if they don't know who you are, they probably can't tie it to you. Glass changes all of that. Now, everything you do is actually likely to be recorded and indexed, and if someone searches for your name, it may just come up even though the person receding it had no idea who you were. The shift is from the expectation that a limited audience will see what you do to the whole world seeing. How does that not have a chilling effect on behavior?
"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
Just because I have a medical procedure done doesn't mean that I want the world to know about it.
What people are asking for isn't privacy, its anonymity. It's that actions they take in public to not be connected back to them.
It's not that someone will see them at the gay club, other people are already at the club, they will see you, you will see them; its a public place, and that's also its entire point. I also don't think its non-exhibitionism thing, since whatever thing they are doing is being done in public. Its that they don't want X finding out they went to a gay club.
The surreptitious recording is a red herring. People can do that now, they just don't because you aren't that interesting. The ability of Glass to do all the facial recognition stuff is what has everyone worried. But that will probably be in the Galaxy S9 or w/e.
This whole things seem predicated on the idea that people will walk around wearing these glasses eaves dropping on total strangers for shits, and just happen to be doing so at the same time those people are discussing their abortion over a venti Chai at Starbucks. And then will post the clip of video thats auto recorded with the persons named attached.
I have no problem talking about my autism, but that's because I'm autistic enough to find the whole situation amusing. On the other hand, I don't think many people want the interwebs to find out about their depression or bipolar disorder because some goose caught part of your conversation with the doctor or the label on your pharmacy prescription on his Glass.
This is not at all the same thing as everything you see ending up stored on the Cloud, and I don't think its particularly reasonable to suggest that there being no "expectation of privacy" makes something half a dozen people saw 20 years ago and don't really remember because, lol, they were as drunk as you were, the same thing as the Never-Dying YouTube clip that exists simultaneously on thousands of computers, seen by millions of people.
The "natural state" for what you refer to as public information has been that it does devolve back to private information since time immemorial. I think its useful to aknowledge that we're actually changing that - not just through Google glass, though it seems to be the most invasive.
That's basically what a house does, apart from sheltering us from the weather. It's a long-term demarcation of an otherwise-public place to render events within more private. Huddling with friends and whispering is just a less permanent form of that same action.
Google Glass is weird. It is just weird. Are privacy concerns how we stop this stuff? If so, yeah. Privacy!.
Everything from sign-in sheets to waiting rooms to the windows in hospital doors are going to become an issue if people are continually recording and sharing everything they see.
The fact that people have been able to do this if they want doesn't change the fact that now everyone is going to be doing this all the fucking time. Man, I really am glad I'm not in our compliance office (not really - compliance makes $TEXAS).
I realize that maybe the generation whose parents gave them facebook feeds before they developed proper lungs and kept GPS trackers in their shoes might have a hard time understanding why checking in on Bodybook ("Its like facebook, but new") at a political rally in a public park might be a fucking bad idea, but - and call me old if you have to - I think the kind of fucked up shit we could do without recording everything that went on in public should inspire a certain suspicioun towards everyone who loudly maintains that there is no law against documenting who walks in and out of a certain apartment.
But then, we'd need to aknowledge that history did, in fact, predate the birth of Justin Bieber. Problematic.
Yeah, they aren't the same at all. A house doesn't demarcate an otherwise public anything, it makes a place no longer public. It changes the nature of the place, since the PUBLIC isn't allowed to enter it. Talking is whispers doesn't change the nature of a sidewalk. Just like wrapping yourselves in a sheet doesn't let you fuck in the middle of central park cause its now 'private' indecency.
Not really. If I have an eidetic memory, does that make me a threat to your privacy? An argument that its likely people would forget who it was that was caught shitting his pants in 3rd grade or who they saw at the strip club and therefore the information is private doesn't hold water. At what point does it become private? When its only a vague memory? If I write it in a diary does that make never devolve?
Rights can not be inherently based on the competency or failures of others. If something is only a right if other people cooperate with what you think of as "normal" its not a right, its a circumstance.
A house isn't "a long-term demarcation of an otherwise-public place to render events within more private." A house is a structure on private property that defines a private space. That's the textbook definition of what a private space is. In order to obtain information from within the house, you have to be an invited guest, resident, owner or illegitimate trespasser.
Speaking more softly doesn't in and of itself make your conversation private, it just makes it less easily overheard. And crossing your fingers and hoping no one overhears you (or that they forget) doesn't make the conversation truly private. If you have "knowingly exposed" something to "another person or the public at large" in public you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy because its no longer private. If you can hear it or see it in public, its not private, even if you lower your voice.
So if you don't want people to know something about you, don't do it in public. Its honestly not that hard. And if you can't do that either adjust your shame level or your actions. Because no other paradigm is consistent with common sense or free expression.
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