An Essay exploring why big-companies are starting to "care" about privacy.
So why have the gravediggers of online privacy suddenly grown so worried about the health of the patient?
Part of the answer is a defect in the language we use to talk about privacy. That language, especially as it is codified in law, is not adequate for the new reality of ubiquitous, mechanized surveillance.
Introduces the concept of Ambient Privacy Privacy:
the understanding that there is value in having everyday interactions with one another that remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered. What we do at home, work, church, school, or in our leisure time does not belong in a permanent record. Not every conversation needs to be a deposition.
Because our laws frame privacy as an individual right, we don’t have a mechanism for deciding whether we want to live in a surveillance society.
Confronted with the reality of a monitored world, people make the rational decision to make the best of it.
That is not consent.
ref Informed Consent is a canard
ahahahaah:
My own suspicion is that ambient privacy plays an important role in civic life. When all discussion takes place under the eye of software, in a for-profit medium working to shape the participants’ behavior, it may not be possible to create the consensus and shared sense of reality that is a prerequisite for self-government
All of this leads me to see a parallel between privacy law and environmental law, ① another area where a technological shift forced us to protect a dwindling resource that earlier generations could take for granted.
overlaps between Ecology and Privacy.
We're at the point where we need a similar shift in perspective in our privacy law. The infrastructure of mass surveillance is too complex, and the tech oligopoly too powerful, to make it meaningful to talk about individual consent. Even experts don’t have a full picture of the surveillance economy, in part because its beneficiaries are so secretive, and in part because the whole system is in flux. Telling people that they own their data, and should decide what to do with it, is just another way of disempowering them.
They correctly see the new round of privacy laws as a weapon to deploy against smaller rivals, further consolidating their control over the algorithmic panopticon.