If you aren't ok with public information being re-broadcasted, don't go outside.
Rights and freedoms that you can only exercise by giving up any semblance of normal life are no rights and freedoms at all. The idea that the moment you step outside of your home or go on-line you forfeit any right to the slightest respect for your privacy and we should just accept this is silly.
And if you think the only people who care are a few internet warriors, please consider the likes of Google's Glass and Street View, where some people have felt strongly enough about the invasions to resort to actual criminal violence in response, and some entire countries have clamped down on the surveillance in response to public concerns.
In any case, with many of these systems, we aren't talking about public information. We're talking about technologies that systematically abuse friendships and commercial relationships by getting one party to tell the technology operators information about another party without that other party's knowledge or consent and potentially even if that information had been given in confidence.
So you agree that you have no such rights and freedoms. That seems like the practical view. The alternative is the path of craziness, filled with things like the "right to be forgotten".
So you agree that you have no such rights and freedoms.
No, I think that just because we can do something, it doesn't mean we should.
In a literal sense, you have no rights or freedoms that you are not prepared to protect with your life. You can lose anything else to someone willing to try hard enough to take it from you. Fortunately, in civilised societies, we do not generally require everyone to die to defend basic human rights that most of us think are worth protecting. Instead we adopt laws and punish those who would break them.
The alternative is the path of craziness, filled with things like the "right to be forgotten".
And as you can probably guess, I support the basic idea of the right to be forgotten as well. I have no problem with requiring companies that specialise in providing easy access to data -- and that make huge amounts of money because of the immense volumes of data they deal with -- to make it harder to access information about, say, victims of abuse or mistaken identity. When the statistics came out about who was really making use of the right to be forgotten ruling in Europe, contrary to all the naysayers, it mostly wasn't people like criminals and politicians who arguably invited negative publicity.
That said, I have no problem with reducing the profile of criminals with spent convictions either, nor those who have done things that were not criminal but which society frowned upon at some point in history. A society that never forgets, full of people who want to hold everything someone ever did against them for all eternity, is not a healthy society. I believe most people can be rehabilitated even after a dark past, and the evidence about how successful different legal systems around the world are at preventing recurrence of damaging behaviour overwhelmingly supports that position as well.
Rights and freedoms that you can only exercise by giving up any semblance of normal life are no rights and freedoms at all. The idea that the moment you step outside of your home or go on-line you forfeit any right to the slightest respect for your privacy and we should just accept this is silly.
And if you think the only people who care are a few internet warriors, please consider the likes of Google's Glass and Street View, where some people have felt strongly enough about the invasions to resort to actual criminal violence in response, and some entire countries have clamped down on the surveillance in response to public concerns.
In any case, with many of these systems, we aren't talking about public information. We're talking about technologies that systematically abuse friendships and commercial relationships by getting one party to tell the technology operators information about another party without that other party's knowledge or consent and potentially even if that information had been given in confidence.