From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Fri Jun 22 2001 - 07:46:30 MDT
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> I've now put an edited version of my Extro 5 talk on my site at
> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/trans.html>. I hope this will make it
> to the Extropy site somewhere, if only to give Mike Lorrey another
> target for his philosophical practice range. :-)
Here is a start:
> Information enables progress in
> many ways, and it is not possible for any person to imagine the ways in which information might be
> used when it can be used freely. Scientific research and business, in particular, thrive on information,
> and the more these institutions know about us, the more they are empowered to create things that
> benefit us. Of course, as with technology, it also empowers them the create things that harm us, but
> just as we don't use that fear to justify restricting technology, we should not use it to justify
> restrictions on the flow of information.
>
Unfortunately, Lee is slightly fogging the issue here. The wide
dissemination of our private information generally provides us with benefits
in the form of economic assets or increased security, while the harm is most
directly impacted upon our individual liberties. As you will probably
notice, this means that this follows Ben Franklin's warning about trading
liberty for security, and winding up with neither in the end. Similarly, the
recent SOTUS decision imposing absolute standards of privacy despite
technology that enables their violation, and raising the demand for legal
instruments in the form of search warrants by trusted legal authorities to
penetrate those privacy boundaries, indicates that I am not out on a limb
here.
Just because technology enables one to commit an act does not miraculously
turn that act from a civic sin into a civic virtue, nor should it be
embraced as a historical invitability. Firearms enable me to mow down dozens
of my neighbors. That ability does not make it my right, nor does it make it
a good act. The benefits of such an act is to reduce population pressure,
and if I select the right neighbors to wipe out, I can also markedly reduce
the tax burden in my community, reduce the future crime rate, and even
prevent the future erosion of liberty at the hands of do-gooder politicos.
Just because I can create that public good with such an act does not mean it
is a good thing to do, as I think should be obvious.
> Secondly, even if we assume (which I do not) that preventing others from distributing information
> about us is a benefit to us, enshrining that into law becomes an economic entitlement that distorts the
> marketplace. It forces business to adopt methods and models that assume such information is "owned"
> by someone else, and therefore requires them to pay more for it than they would without the laws.
> This will make some business models and research proposals impractical that might otherwise have
> been a great benefit to us. Credit reporting is a classic example. We may not like the fact that
> businesses share information about our purchases and our finances, but without that sharing of
> information, the economic benefits of credit would not be available to us, or would be significantly
> more expensive. In short, if this kind of privacy is something we want, then we should have to pay for
> it ourselves, and develop technologies to make it cheaper.
>
Considering that that information is about us, it belongs to us to begin
with, and it is our choice, as voluntary participants in the economy, what
entities are enabled (NOT entitled) to be given that information, under what
circumstances, etc. Businesses have no inherent rights. They are not
people, and, as demonstrated by Harvey Newstrom's talk at Extro5, they are
heinously disengenuous in their history of complying with privacy clauses in
their contracts. From such information, it is rather easy to surmise that
the vast majority of the information present in the world about us exists
without our agreement and is thus pirated data, since we are the original
source and exists elsewhere without our approval.
Personally, I consider credit to be a net negative benefit to individuals.
It is simply a tool for wage enslavement that is gussied up to seem like a
good deal, and part of that prettying up has to do with the relative low
cost of it that comes from the use by corporations of our data under
involuntary conditions. Every penny you save on your credit card bills is
someone else's freedom.
Credit is, simply, security. It is an estimation of how well vetted an
individual is in an economic police state. Thus trading liberty for credit
also falls under Franklin's warning.
> Hal Varian brought up a wonderful example. When Blockbuster Video first opened, their business
> model was to purchase videotapes of movies from the producer and rent them to the consumer. It
> generally worked, but the high cost of the tapes (required because the producer got nothing but the
> up-front cost and had no control over rentals) forced them to buy very few of them, and popular movies
> were constantly unavailable at the time when they were most in demand--clearly a bad situation for
> consumers and sellers. Blockbuster's solution was to install a nationwide network of cash registers to
> track exactly when each tape was rented, with this information made available to the movie
> producers. This enabled them to change to a different contract with the producers, whereby instead of
> buying a small number of tapes at a high price, they bought large numbers cheaply with the
> agreement that they would forward part of the rental fee to the producer. Blockbuster can now
> guarantee that popular movies will be available, more people rent them when they are in demand
> pleasing the consumers, and both Blockbuster and the producers make more money. This win-win
> situation was only made possible by the fact that information about when each tape is
> rented--information that some people might want to restrict in the name of "privacy"--was made freely
> available.
>
Again, giving the movie producers security enough to take the risk of
renting their movies to a greater degree lowered their costs while
sacrificing the privacy of the users. However, sacrificing the privacy of
the end user is not necessary for this to occur. All Blockbuster needs to
provide the movie studios with is a means of auditing cash transactions on a
real time basis. There is no need for the studios to know who exactly rented
a given movie, or how many movies. They only need to know accurately how
many times a week their movie was rented. I've seen the same thing with
smart cards in parking lots. A friend of mine in Seattle is the founder of
EPS, Electronic Payment Systems, which makes smart card systems for parking
lots and subway systems, among other things. The problem with parking lots
is that with the 'dumb contract' methods used in the past of slot boxes for
parkers to place cash, or meters, etc, there was a very low rate of
reporting by the companies managing the lots to the people or companies that
owned the lots themselves, indicating the possibility that there was a
significant amount of skimming going on by the managing company or its
employees.
However, it was found that few people wanted to buy the EPS systems to
replace the management companies, which hints at the possibility that they
were in collusion with the managment companies to avoid taxes on that
revinue, thus in the end, the only real beneficiary of a privacy violating
system in this case is the government in its zeal to confiscate ever more of
the wealth of private citizens. Indeed, when EPS systems were instituted and
full reporting thus took place, lot owners had to raise the per slot parking
fees to make up for their tax payments, so in the end the individual
consumer was a net loser, not only in privacy, but also in terms of
economics and security (a hacker/stalker could determine the location of
their vehicle, or could determine the owner of a vehicle by a credit check
based on their smart card payment, etc)
> There are good reasons for us to value privacy in the current world. We have all come from cultures
> with powerful and intrusive governments who interfere in the lives of their subjects in many ways.
>
It is far older than that. Privacy originates in the need to conceal
weaknesses or unfitness, not only to potential rivals in the intratribal
pecking order of one's gender or in confrontations between tribes, but also
to potential reproductive candidates. Babies with very overt birth defects
were not only killed to reduce burdens on the tribe, but couples that
produced such babies were ostracized as cursed or demon posessed, or else
they would themselves accuse someone else of witchcraft in deforming their
child. In combat, one always sought to conceal one's weaknesses, scars, etc
and to seek out those of one's opponent.
In this manner, demanding the end to privacy is tantamount to giving up on
such principles as innocent until proven guilty, of trust of fellow
individuals, instead accepting a rather fatalistic and primitive view of
treating everyone else as the enemy.
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