Re: Arguments _against_ privacy, anyone?

[attila <attila@primenet.com>]

Date:    Sun, 21 Apr 1996 15:58:03 -0700 (PDT)

***where do some of these people get off the bus?


>From:    Phil Agre <pagre@weber.ucsd.edu>
Subject: Call for bad arguments against privacy

  * "We've lost so much of our privacy anyway."

	***and that justifies stripping you of the rest, correct?

  * "Privacy is an obsolete Victorian hang-up."

	***arrest that man for public nudity!

  * "Ideas about privacy are culturally specific and it is thus
     impossible to define privacy in the law without bias."

	***let me ask you, boy, just what the fuck you mean?

  * "We have strong security on our data."

	***yawn...

  * "National identity cards protect privacy by improving
     authentication and data security."

	***you must like to mutilate your body when they insert the chip?

  * "Informational privacy can be protected by converting it into
     a property right."

	***yes, if you not consider that the concept of property rights, 
		i.e. title, must be defined byins contents?

  * "We have to balance privacy against industry concerns."

	***what's good for General Motors is good for the country.

  * "Privacy paranoids want to turn back the technological clock."

	***yes, number 4078956898346, your comment has been registered.

  * "Most people are privacy pragmatists who can be trusted to make
     intelligent trade-offs between functionality and privacy."

	***yes, just like people are inherently good, unless the 
		issue is money.

  * "Our lives will inevitably become visible to others, so the
     real issue is mutual visibility, achieving a balance of power
     by enabling us to watch the people who are watching us."

	***yes, you do not throw stones at others who live in glass houses.

  * "Once you really analyze it, the concept of privacy is so
     nebulous that it provides no useful guidance for action."

	***oh, it is better that government take no action???

  * "People *want* these systems, as indicated by the percentage
     of them who sign up for them once they become available."

	***dale carnegie: will you ever quit selling your ideas!

  * "Concern for privacy is anti-social and obstructs the building
     of a democratic society."

	***aaaah, taxation by representation?

  * "Privacy regulation is just one more category of government
     interference in the market, which after all is much better
     at weighing individuals' relative preferences for privacy
     and everything else than bureaucratic rules could ever be."

	***huuh?

  * "There's no privacy in public."

	***no? try screaming 'rape' in NYC

  * "We favor limited access."

	***to just the thought police?

  * "Privacy in these systems has not emerged as a national issue."



--
Overseeing first-rate programmers is a managerial challenge 
  roughly comparable to herding cats.

cc: Cypherpunks <cypherpunks@toad.com>
    Phil Agre <pagre@weber.ucsd.edu>