It seems like a month can't go by without some privacy hoopla happening. In most cases, it's not that new data about people that was once super-private suddenly because public, it's that the ability of the 'net to reduce the distance between two points -- information and the person who wants it -- makes geography nil.
That is, many of the records that are now shockingly available, have always been available: you just had to go to the county courthouse to manually fetch them an manually search them. Now, that's all automated.
Of course, all the information isn't of this type: much of it is indeed information that "should" be kept private.
I've been having two re-occurring, but opposite-like thoughts about all this recently:
Why be Private?
In the last few months, I've been wondering why all that data needs to be private. How bad would your life be if all your medical records were public domain? If my credit report was listed right to the left of this post?
How this would damage you is a sort of prisoner's dilemma: if only a minority revealed all their information, the majority would take advantage of that information. The majority would look at the data-in-the-clear minority's medical records and say things like, "whoa, you're going to cost me way too much to insure, so I'm not hiring you no matter how good a worker you are."
But if everyone had their data in the clear, would that solve the "denied job 'cause you're too costly to insure" dilemma? The thinking here is, everyone has skeletons in their info-closet, and if they started getting on you about something bad on your credit, you could easily whip out something bad or equally bad about theirs. It's a sort of mutual-assured destruction policy when it comes to information sharing.
It'd be a cool experiment to just put all your information out there and see what happens. Of course, it wouldn't be a valid experiment. If someone just up and did it, it'd be so novel, that it wouldn't represent what would happen if everyone did it. They'd get shit-loads of hits just because they were so whacky.
So, my question to you, dear readers, is, what would be wrong with all information about everyone being in the open?
Copyrighting my Info
At the other end of the spectrum, I wonder why we can't just copyright all information about us. That is, to me, it seems like I own any information that exists that's about me.
If I forget to pay my credit card for 3 years, creating a bad credit report about me, that information is mine: I created, even invented that information. If I have a heart attack (around 35 probably I'm guessing), and go to the hospital, all that information extracts from me and the occurrence of my heart-attach is mine: again, I created/invented it.
Now, that's a little on the absurd side to be sure, but I think there's something to it. If I recall, when you take photographs or videos of people, you have to get a release from them if you want to use those images (at least) in a commercial way. It seems that this same legal-logic (TM) would apply to information about a person. If a grocery store has been tracking how many times I buy pregnancy tests, they're capturing part of me, part of my existence, just as a photographer is capturing part of my life when they take a photo.
(Of course, you'd also have to make it illegal to force people to sign over their copyright to get a good or service, otherwise, every time you went into a hospital, you'd have to sign some paper that was the equivalent of "if you want us to save you life, give us all your info.)
Being Pragmatic
When it comes to secrets, I try desperately to be very pragmatic. To me, secrets are just things that are more prone to become wide-spread, public knowledge than non-secrets. People want to know secrets, and they'll work harder to find those out than they will public, boring info. Everyone wants the dirt; I know I do.
The quickest (not best or truest) way to "solve" a problem, is to redefine the words and context being used to describe the problem. That's where the idea of converting all this secret information to public information comes from: putting the whole problem on it's head, a little edge thinking.
From a business standpoint, if someone like ChoicePoint had to go to every individual to get a release for their copyrighted life info, they'd go out of business. Being able to copyright your life-info would be a pragmatic way to shutdown all the info-aggregator business. As an interesting side-effect, it'd get everyone involved in the copyright game, making them a little more empathetic to all that DRM stuff. Everyone would want DRM for their own lives, so they might be more understanding when the RIAA wants it for everything else.
Previous Topic
