Re: Privacy: Law, Custom, and Technology

[Unprivileged user <nobody@www.video-collage.com>]

On Tue, 22 Jul 1997, Bill Frantz wrote:

> As far as I can tell, law, custom, and technology are the three ways we
> have to protect our privacy.  Cypherpunks are well aware of the
> technological options, so I won't discuss them further except to note that
> they probably are not, by themselves, enough.
... 
> The last is custom.  This approach appears in cypherpunk discussions as an
> emphasis on contractual relations between people and the organizations
> receiving data.  It is this area I would like to discuss.
...
> What makes a good privacy contract?  What should you expect when you buy
> something?  What is the standard contract?  What exceptions must be clearly
> noted?  How does society decide these cultural issues?

A contract is something within law and enforcable by courts, so you aren't
really talking "custom".  And even with private contracts, not everything
is enforcable.  Other times something like a contract (IANAL) is created
such as when I buy a product unless it says "as-is" it has some implicit
warranties under the universal commercial code.

Contracts are good things, but they are cumbersome because they have to be
negotiated on the spot [like the man at computer city who wrote on the
back of his check for their "club" membership - acceptance of this ... 
says you won't send me junkmail;  They deposited the check and he sued and
won].

On a web page, I usually cannot send an E-NDA in the form they want me to
fill out (so I often leave spaces blank or with obviously bad numbers and
some comment to contact me).  This is usually less efficient than phoning.

This leaves Custom as such, a social instead of a legal contract.  The net
has been good at policing its own.  Web pages asking for email addresses
aren't supposed to forward them to spambots.  They now often state this
explicitly.  If someone says something wrong in a discussion group, they
get flamed, and if they do it enough, they are placed in everyone's kill
file.

The problem is that culture takes a while to learn, and with everyone with
different customs comes to the net, they may not see anything wrong with
doing something they are used to (for a physical world example: some local
immigrants from an area where barter was the custom tried haggling on
price-tagged items until they figured out what was going on). 

Custom is determined by evolution, not by specification.  And that cannot
be accelerated, and will be a problem until everyone has been on the net
long enough to establish a common set of manners.  How much information
does someone retain?  Enough so that a web page presents your desired
configuration without having to retype it?  Should they pass this on to a
sister site?  A different company? 

The worst thing that can happen is to codify custom.  I can see that as
the reason to avoid "Voluntary Ratings", because as soon as a misrated
(who determines?) page comes up, it becomes cause for a legal action, and
then everyone will want it to be manditory and enforced.

So a measure of politeness (indicating what the content might be so it can
be filtered) becomes a political battle, almost as if I don't go out and
say something offensive in public every day then I am not defending my
first ammendment rights - which is only slightly less bizzarre than some
of the judicial decisions.

--- reply to tzeruch - at - ceddec - dot - com ---