Once upon a time and long ago, my grandfather (and every other trustee of the University of New Hampshire) got an irate handwritten letter from Colebrook, NH. A high school student’s girlfriend had been turned down for admission. He wanted to let the trustees know–that was a big mistake!
That boy’s work, tracking down all those trustees, was much more impressive than the letter itself. My grandfather chuckled at his flowery prose–but made sure the boy himself got into college.
My point–and I do have one–is inspired by
something Scott Johnson blogged today about Fundrace:
Eek fricking Eek. I saw over on Slashdot a mention of Fundrace 2004, a new website which lets you see how your neighbors are donating funds to politicians. So I tried it. Eek….
Yes this may be publicly available information but by wrapping it into a web front end and essentially “democratizing it”, its scary. Yes I know I have no privacy but even so…
There goes yet another “reasonable expectation of privacy.”
Those of us who were around in the mid 1850s will recall that the secret ballot is there for a reason. Experience shows that employers can get pretty nasty if you don’t support their favorite candidate.
Now people who thought they were giving personal data to the US government wake up to discover it’s out there on the internet. And not just the name of the candidate they support–their home addresses, job titles, and employers. The potential for abuse seems huge to me.
I don’t like the feeling that things that for years have been private are now up for sale, or given away for free. It’s like waking up one morning and discovering that someone has given away my lawn chair and is digging up my tulips–“Hey, they weren’t nailed down.”
I’d like to see the presumption of right reversed. Instead of assuming that people have a right to broadcast the name of my candidate and the color of my bra–couldn’t we assume that I have some common law (or Fourth Amendment) right to privacy?
Is anything really private? Probably not. We can’t block the boy from Colebrook who cares enough to find the addresses of 10 college trustees. But we can put a stop to the presumption that after finding that information, he owns a right to publish it to the world.
My blog has a Creative Commons license–stuff I put out here is public. You can quote me and even create derivative works so long as you credit my work as a source. If you’re planning to sell my stuff–you have to ask me. But there’s a lot of stuff in my life that I don’t put out here, and I don’t want to see out there. I think that choice ought to remain with me.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Adina Levin // Mar 29, 2004 at 8:35 pm
I’m in favor of privacy, but I disagree strongly with your point. The cost of campaigning has moved the US away from “one person one vote” toward “one dollar one vote.” Campaign money buys access. Public information about campaign contributions provides citizens with critical information about who’s paying a politician’s ticket.
2 Richard // Mar 29, 2004 at 10:32 pm
Money buys access (since when did it *not* buy access?), but does it buy policy? I think the answer is “sometimes”, and yes it sucks, but what if that policy is a generally good one?
“Experience shows that employers can get pretty nasty if you don’t support their favorite candidate.”
Why limit yourself to employers? How about “people”? Is it so shocking that employers are people too?
I’d be interested to see the laws that apply to political donations and privacy. Did people expect to have their privacy when it was unreasonable to expect it? Were they told (or was it publically available) that what they were doing could be accessed by anyone going through the proper channels?
Privacy is–as everything is–a form of currency. You give it up in order to get something. Sometimes you give it up and you either don’t get what you expected–reasonably or not–or sometimes your data is used incorrectly. I also think that the choice to give up your personal information should be up to you, which means that you have the choice to say “if I give this information, you must give me [x]”.
Also, I think the Creative Commons issue is a copyright one and not a privacy one. Well, it’s both, really, but selling your entries is not a violation of your privacy, because it’s already out in the public for everybody to see. If you wrote a password-protected entry, then selling it would be, but if it’s dynamite stuff, and you get an offer you can’t refuse for it, by definition you’d take it. It’s why the people on reality TV do what they do: these may not be the brightest people in the world, but at least they understand that to get on TV it’s worth having your private life exposed.
So I agree with Adina: although I’d like to see what the privacy policy of the government or political parties is, people who donate to a political camapaign in the 21st centuary unreasonably expect that donation to be secret.
3 Richard // Mar 29, 2004 at 10:33 pm
Also, why is Scott so upset that people are using publically available information and putting a web interface to it? Is he suggesting that certain publically available information should be presented on the Web as is or not at all?
4 Betsy Devine // Mar 30, 2004 at 3:00 am
Maybe this case is not the one where I should rant about privacy–though it does feel funny to know this about my neighbors. Adina, are you telling me that “this feels funny” isn’t a constitutional test of legal versus illegal? Adina and Richard are right that somebody should know where our campaign donations went–and “this information could be abused” isn’t the test of right or wrong either.
5 xyz@z... // Apr 2, 2004 at 6:34 am
Hi Richard,
I understand your point. My feeling comes from the observation that when you make something 10X easier, it is no longer the same thing. The quantum ease of use leap from going to the government, filing a FOIA request (or whatever) to a web interface makes getting this type of political info fundamentally different. (IMHO of course).
Here’s another example. Think about your children’s teachers finding out how their parents voted. To me that’s scary. I just can’t see a teacher going to the government to look this up manually but I can easily see them doing it from a web browser.
Perhaps I’m being dumb here.
Scott