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more notes -- Wired, Bill Clinton, and privacy arguments
``` Some reminders and follow-ups.
Reminder #1: Send me good stuff for RRE. If it's something the whole world needs to see, something on the Internet that seems once-a-year important, copyright permitting, pass it along.
Reminder #2: Eudora users are beseeched not to employ the immoral "redirect" command to forward RRE messages to their friends.
Steve Steinberg wrote to suggest that I overestimated his endorsement of the various rhetorical dichotomies employed by the Internet gurus in his netheads-versus-bellheads article in Wired. Fair enough. Wired isn't a monolith. I think it has gotten better in the last year in fact, and its more serious writers do stray from the technological determinism for which the magazine is famed. In any case it's a good article; read it and decide for yourself.
I felt bad about one aspect of my book recommendation on Bill Clinton's personality. I know lots of people who grew up in alcoholic households who have snapped out of denial and started down the long hard road of recovery. It's just that Bill Clinton isn't one of them. And although Newt Gingrich is not an excellent person when judged by his actions, my sense is that he exhibits more self-awareness than Bill does.
About my collection of rebuttals to bad arguments against privacy that I provided in TNO 3(7). Writing those rebuttals is like juggling ten different kinds of chainsaws at once. I'm hoping that everyone will recognize the seriousness of the project and cut me some slack if I should happen to drop one of them. Fortunately, several of my friends on RRE have been making constructive contributions to the project by helping to me strengthen the rebuttals. They, of course, mostly don't think the arguments are bad, but that's okay. They've helped me get rid of some of the polemics, which is good because polemics are self-indulgent and self-defeating. They've made me expand on my reasoning in some places as well. I'll just mention a couple of points right here.
People keep asking me, what about the good arguments against privacy? I haven't encountered any, but that's partly because I recognize that privacy rights are not absolute, and so conflicts with other rights do arise and have to be reasoned through. I just tend to find that those conflicts are less frequent and less serious in their practical implications than many other people do. For me, the hardest area is workplace privacy. I am not very happy with the normative analyses of workplace privacy issues that I have encountered. Part of the problem is a shortage of adequate descriptive analyses of the concrete workplace phenomena within which privacy issues have been thought to arise, and I have tried in my own small way to remedy this situation in my own work.
In any event, by far the biggest controversy has concerned a particular view of privacy issues that seems to be growing rapidly. It needs a name, so I will call it "radical transparency": the idea that all information about everyone should be completely open. I did not treat this idea at any great length when I first wrote about it in TNO 3(2), for the simple reason that I still cannot understand its appeal. To be honest, I find the idea to be wildly out of touch with reality. On the other hand, an increasing number of intelligent people subscribe to it. This is a mystery, and I am actively trying to figure it out. Maybe they're seeing something that I do not see. I will not try to produce a comprehensive rebuttal to radical transparency right now, but here anyway are the five arguments in favor of it that I am aware of. I have discussed some of these in TNO but not others.
* "The Internet makes it inevitable that all information will become accessible to everyone, so there's no use in fighting it."* "It is unhealthy to try to keep information about yourself secret. Completely open information would make everyone healthier and facilitate many more connections between people."* "Many heroes, consumer advocates and reporters for example, have relied upon open access to information, and there exists no coherent way to simultaneously defend (good) individuals' rights to control information and attack (bad) organizations' rights to control information."* "Individuals have already lost their privacy, or if any privacy remains then it will inevitably be lost. And so the only thing we can do is ensure that everybody is equally exposed to investigation by everybody else, thus ensuring some degree of accountability all around."* "Society should be run by analogy to the scientific community. Science operates on open information. Without open information, there can be no science. Without science, there can be no knowledge. Without knowledge, we are doomed to superstition and calamity. We must therefore open as much information as we can."
Someday in my abundant spare time, I will write out my rebuttals to these arguments. Or perhaps I will wake up, see the light, and agree with one or more of them. You never know.
Phil ```
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