Internet monitoring: ethical?

[Shadowcliff]

I barely visit this site nowadays, but sometimes I see something on the news or online and I have to wonder what the FFR community thinks about it.

Topic: Internet monitoring/unwarranted search and seizure.

Argument: "If you're not doing anything wrong, then why be worried about it?"

Now, I have problems when it comes to defending myself--I can't seem to iterate my thoughts very thoroughly when in face-to-face conversation.
However, I know that there is something very wrong with the argument that I listed above. I just can't quite place it.

What are your thoughts? Answer the question: why be worried if you've nothing to hide?

[JohnRedWolf87]

"Why be worried if you've nothing to hide?"

Because not many people are comfortable with others monitoring their porn, among other things. :P

[Hakulyte]

I'm taking a shower in 20 minutes, please invite all your friends and get the camera.

Edit: I just noticed this wasn't chit chat my bad.

I'll return the question and ask "what's a reasonable right of privacy for Internet?".

[Hateandhatred]

Haku has it right.

Imagine all the situations. You post on an anonymous forum and ask for help for various extremely intimate issues. Now people (officials) will see that you did this. Downloading some shamefully kinky pornography? Not a secret anymore (illegal things are a different story), and the list goes on.

Advocates of this think the internet is just a working tool where people do things they need to do, search for useful things, maybe play some games, etc. They have absolutely no idea how it is a huge universe just as big as the irl one. People get really personnal on here and stuff, so monitoring it is exactly the equal of having a chip on you that determines your position, and records via video and microphone everything you say and do, and every house would be rigged with cameras and microphones everywhere.

I'm not sure how people still think funtionning like in Orwell's 1984 is such a great idea...

[Reincarnate]

Originally Posted by Shadowcliff

Argument: "If you're not doing anything wrong, then why be worried about it?"

Anytime anyone ever makes this argument, I immediately respond with, "Alright, so take off all your clothes. You've got nothing to hide, right? While you're at it, let me go through your bedroom, and let me see your browser history and banking statements."

Having nothing illegal to hide doesn't mean we don't still desire privacy. There's a fundamental problem with privacy invasion because you don't know how the invader will use the information gathered. Sometimes the information will be incomplete in scope and will get taken out of context. Sometimes it's just shit we want kept to ourselves that isn't anyone else's business.

From http://falkvinge.net/2012/07/19/debu...thing-to-fear/

Posting the main points here for the lazy:

One – The rules may change: Once the invasive surveillance is in place to enforce rules that you agree with, the ruleset that is being enforced could change in ways that you don’t agree with at all – but then, it is too late to protest the surveillance. For example, you may agree to cameras in every home to prevent domestic violence (“and domestic violence only”) – but the next day, a new political force in power could decide that homosexuality will again be illegal, and they will use the existing home cameras to enforce their new rules. Any surveillance must be regarded in terms of how it can be abused by a worse power than today’s.

Two – It’s not you who determine if you have something to fear: You may consider yourself law-abidingly white as snow, and it won’t matter a bit. What does matter is whether you set off the red flags in the mostly-automated surveillance, where bureaucrats look at your life in microscopic detail through a long paper tube to search for patterns. When you stop your car at the main prostitution street for two hours every Friday night, the Social Services Authority will draw certain conclusions from that data point, and won’t care about the fact that you help your elderly grandmother – who lives there – with her weekly groceries. When you frequently stop at a certain bar on your way driving home from work, the Department of Driving Licenses will draw certain conclusions as to your eligibility for future driving licenses – regardless of the fact that you think they serve the world’s best reindeer meatballs in that bar, and never had had a single beer there. People will stop thinking in terms of what is legal, and start acting in self-censorship to avoid being red-flagged, out of pure self-preservation. (It doesn’t matter that somebody in the right might possibly and eventually be cleared – after having been investigated for six months, you will have lost both custody of your children, your job, and possibly your home.)

Two and a half – Point two assumes that the surveillance even has correct data, which it has been proven time and again to frequently not have.

Three – Laws must be broken for society to progress: A society which can enforce all of its laws will stop dead in its tracks. The mindset of “rounding up criminals is good for society” is a very dangerous one, for in hindsight, it may turn out that the criminals were the ones in the moral right. Less than a human lifetime ago, if you were born a homosexual, you were criminal from birth. If today’s surveillance level had existed in the 1950s and 60s, the lobby groups for sexual equality could never have formed; it would have been just a matter of rounding up the organized criminals (“and who could possibly object to fighting organized crime?”). If today’s surveillance level had existed in the 1950s and 60s, homosexuality would still be illegal and homosexual people would be criminals by birth. It is an absolute necessity to be able to break unjust laws for society to progress and question its own values, in order to learn from mistakes and move on as a society.

Four – Privacy is a basic human need: Implying that only the dishonest people have need of any privacy ignores a basic property of the human psyche, and sends a creepy message of strong discomfort. We have a fundamental need for privacy. I lock the door when I go to the men’s room, despite the fact that nothing secret happens in there: I just want to keep that activity to myself, I have a fundamental need to do so, and any society must respect that fundamental need for privacy. In every society that doesn’t, citizens have responded with subterfuge and created their own private areas out of reach of the governmental surveillance, not because they are criminal, but because doing so is a fundamental human need.

[FissionMailed1]

Reincarnate's post is pretty much exactly what I was going to post. Is there really anything else to say on this? The original argument is a straw man.

[igotrhythm]

I'm gonna play devil's advocate here.

A certain amount of monitoring is essential for internet service providers to cover their asses. If they see someone is using their services to perform illegal activities (torrenting copyrighted material being the most obvious example), then they are on the front lines to stop it and deny future service to the customer, as well as hand over records of the illegal activity to the authorities as evidence. They provide an important service to their customers, and as such the ISP companies have a responsibility to ensure that their customers use their services in accordance with their end user license agreements. (Even though no end-user actually takes the time to read them since it's in so much legalese.)

So let's take this tack: Any amount of monitoring is a bad thing. If so, then we can't have our browser remember our password--that's a security risk! We can't have Google suggesting things for us as that uses tracking cookies. We can't have Facebook suggesting people to add to our friends list and pages to follow because it sees what we're interested in and comes up with others along similar lines. We can't even have FFR remember what our favorite settings are--again, cookies.

So you see, a certain amount of tracking is necessary and useful to the smooth functioning of a person's relationship with the Internet. There does, of course, come a point where tracking gets excessive and invasive, and this is where I think the trouble starts with ethical, moral and legal arguments over where exactly that border should exist.

[Reincarnate]

Originally Posted by igotrhythm

I'm gonna play devil's advocate here.

A certain amount of monitoring is essential for internet service providers to cover their asses. If they see someone is using their services to perform illegal activities (torrenting copyrighted material being the most obvious example), then they are on the front lines to stop it and deny future service to the customer, as well as hand over records of the illegal activity to the authorities as evidence. They provide an important service to their customers, and as such the ISP companies have a responsibility to ensure that their customers use their services in accordance with their end user license agreements. (Even though no end-user actually takes the time to read them since it's in so much legalese.)

So let's take this tack: Any amount of monitoring is a bad thing. If so, then we can't have our browser remember our password--that's a security risk! We can't have Google suggesting things for us as that uses tracking cookies. We can't have Facebook suggesting people to add to our friends list and pages to follow because it sees what we're interested in and comes up with others along similar lines. We can't even have FFR remember what our favorite settings are--again, cookies.

There's a big difference here, though, and it doesn't boil down to a spectrum-style argument of "how much?"

It's much, much, much, much harder to offer a legitimate explanation as to why you were downloading illegal shit vs. giving an explanation for why you decided to Google "how does chloroform work" one day. The former is a very clear-cut illegal activity, whereas the latter is just a data point that isn't illegal in itself, but can be abused.

The problem is data mining. With enough data you can pretty much find any relationship that you want. For example, if I look at enough sets of data (in general -- just any arbitrary sets of data from anything you can think of), I can find something that has accurately predicted every single Presidential election, to date. Of course, that sort of thing will come up by chance alone with sufficient data, and the relationship won't actually exist when you look at the probabilities on-margin going forward.

In other words, if I were to know every single bit of information about your life, I can find and string together whatever bits and pieces I want in order to support the narrative I wish to push forward, no matter how circumstantial the evidence may be.

And so by allowing third parties to milk your data, you're granting them the power to fuck with you if they see fit.

[Cavernio]

"Alright, so take off all your clothes. You've got nothing to hide, right? While you're at it, let me go through your bedroom, and let me see your browser history and banking statements."

If everyone else were also naked, of course I'd be naked. That statement really does sum up what I feel about this on a lot of levels.

Addresses 4: Firstly, If everyone is being monitored, or might get scrutinized randomly or even misleadingly, I really don't care. The reality is that everyone has things that they are ashamed of and don't want people to know. Our society works around covering things up, putting on appearances, while underneath there's plenty of interpersonal and intrapersonal things that don't meet societal expectations of what is right or proper. When someone gets access to your more personal life, especially when you don't give it to them, is when you feel your privacy becomes violated. But in a situation where everyone's always exposed, the norm will change, and individually people will define their privacy bounds as smaller than they currently are. I agree that there is probably some sort of fundamental, biologically healthy privacy barrier that should not be exceeded, but what this proposes doesn't reach that. Why people feel that their privacy is being invaded with ISP tracking seems largely to break societally induced norms, not any fundamentally existing ones. How many people 20 and younger honestly care if their activity is being tracked by big brother? Any age discrepancy with what people view as invasion of privacy supports what I've said.

"The problem is data mining. With enough data you can pretty much find any relationship that you want. For example, if I look at enough sets of data (in general -- just any arbitrary sets of data from anything you can think of), I can find something that has accurately predicted every single Presidential election, to date. Of course, that sort of thing will come up by chance alone with sufficient data, and the relationship won't actually exist when you look at the probabilities on-margin going forward. In other words, if I were to know every single bit of information about your life, I can find and string together whatever bits and pieces I want in order to support the narrative I wish to push forward, no matter how circumstantial the evidence may be."

More data is worse data? Too much information in the wrong hands is too dangerous? I fail to see how this is any worse than less data being used for the same purpose. With less complete data, we are far MORE likely to come to conclusions that are inaccurate.
What I think you're (also) saying definitely brings in a human component that people put trust in data, in numbers, and so people will trust what the numbers show more and use their heads less, when deciding what is true and what isn't. But I could still use this argument in the same way to say, oh, we shouldn't bother with scientific experiments, because sometimes the data is misleading.

Argument 3 isn't even an argument against ISP surveillance, but of law enforcement. "A society which can enforce all of its laws will stop dead in its tracks." That's a pretty bold statement, but I totally get where it's coming from. But being able to track and monitor who is doing wrong things is completely different from arresting and rounding up every homosexual if homosexuality were still illegal. ISP tracking isn't the SS. In fact, I could construe an entirely different scenario regarding gay rights and ISP tracking, that it could in fact have HELPED with such social movements because people's sexual practices would have been out in the open for all to see, instead of having so many people hide their sexuality and ultimately slow down the societal change in mindset.

Point 2, is, again, based on what gets done with the data. There's a HUGE difference between being scrutinized from afar or even having a cop car trail you because they think you might be drinking and driving, and having them arrest you and detain you. I mean, if homosexuality became illegal, the problem that needs to be resolved is that such a law passed in the first place.

I don't know why people have a hard time separating surveillance from action.

The biggest argument against surveillance of people's internet activities is a slight variation of point 1 that Rubix posted. If we have this level of surveillance, we need to know exactly what is and what it won't be used for, and wherever it is being used, we need tight laws around it to make sure it doesn't get abused. Yes, such a law allows the government more power. But as long as they don't stupidly start enforcing arcane laws that they don't act on right now (how many prostitutes get arrested simply because they are prostitutes, even though it's completely illegal), or create new ones that make innocuous things illegal, I expect very little change in our lives. More importantly and more to the point, the more power that a government has, it's far easier for it to abuse that power. Perhaps we'll find that the current system of government and that level of surveillance don't work together. But from what I see right now, if ISP monitoring breaks down society, then the blame would fall on poor laws and enforcement, not the monitoring itself.

[Reincarnate]

That post is almost too ridiculous to respond to. I seriously urge you to re-evaluate what you are saying. You have no clue what you're talking about.

I'm not trying to be mean but ffs there are so many things wrong with that post that it tires me to just think about debunking all of that. Practically every single major point in that post is wrong.

EDIT: I'll let Reddit do the job for me -- maybe this will help shine some light on what life is like when "everyone is naked": http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview...wed_to/caeb3pl

[JJTrixX]

Originally Posted by Shadowcliff

Answer the question: why be worried if you've nothing to hide?

There is no need to worry if you have nothing to hide. It is because you have something to hide, that you worry. The worry is the fear of it no longer being hidden. The question you should be asking yourself is this, "What do I have to hide and why?"

Why do people sometimes hide their true emotions? Why do people sometimes hide the truth? Why do people sometimes hide their money/possesions from the general public? Hiding in some way or another is inclusive to everyone. It is to protect either themselves or others from being taken advantage of. If whom they are protecting does not come with the cost of afflicting another being to the best of your knowledge, then that persons privacy should be respected, for you would expect the same in return for yourself.

The one asking you, "why be worried if you've nothing to hide?" is actually worried himself, because if he believed you had nothing to hide, he wouldn't be trying to monitor what you're doing on the internet, nor asking the question. The questioner has already made the assumption that you do have something to hide and because he is asking "why worry?", he is assuming that the reason for why you are hiding it, is unethical. It is obvious that the questioner does not trust you, nor does he understand why or what you are hiding. The realization of not knowing, causes fear in select individuals.

The question we should be asking is this: "Which individuals have the right to privacy in terms of internet usage?"

This raises the nest question, "What is our frame of reference to determine and judge what is to be considered ethical and unethical? People who have conflicting beliefs have no order. Therefore there must be a code of morality that supersedes our own personal beliefs for the purpose of peace. From where and whom does this 'code' come from? That's a whole other topic of discussion......

I hope I answered your question, I tried not to get too specific to avoid writing a book lol

[Cavernio]

If your argument is that you cannot separate more monitoring without a slippery slope of stricter laws and the ultimate collapse of free speech, then you'll have to do better than give real-life examples where they're connected in countries run by corruption and backwards social views to make that be a necessary outcome.

If you are worried what a government will do with an overload of personal information, then there are other issues that should be addressed from the government. Furthermore, you don't need ISP access to flag people as 'terrorists' or to threaten people. The government already has all of our personal information, controls the military, controls laws, etc. And it's not like most activities people do are secret...public rallies least of all.

Why aren't we all mad at our banks for knowing how much we make?

[Reincarnate]

Banks know how much we make because that's their function -- to deal with our financial data and provide a service that can't be done without knowing the financial data by definition.

In contrast, the government doesn't need to know everything about everything in order to "protect its citizens," especially if it doesn't actually make us safer and is more prone to data-mining confirmation-bias that generates far more problems than it solves. In other words, such a "service" is not necessary for a well-functioning society. It's actually harmful.

[Reincarnate]

Originally Posted by MrPopadopalis25

Every human being on this planet deserves privacy and autonomy irrespective of whether they're doing something "wrong" or not. Whether you're a person with a history of violent crimes looking up escorts on craigslist or an old man who only uses his rural dial-up connection to check the weather and lottery numbers, you deserve to have a certain level of unobtrusiveness in your life. Yes, not monitoring every single person will result in crimes being committed that otherwise could've been prevented, but the cost of being spied on 24/7 isn't worth the prevention at all.

It's like saying "Hey, you're doing a great job and everything, but we're going to have this dude shadow you during all of your shifts to make sure that you don't do anything wrong. It's for your protection, dude."

It's even worse than that:

1. It doesn't predict all that well
2. There are way too many false positives
3. I guess 2. is really the same as 1.
4. The point is that serious stuff can still fly under the radar, and a bunch of useless shit will take up the bulk of things.

[Cavernio]

Even if I don't give a shit if I'm being monitored or not on the internet, it's still a colossal waste of public money.

[Dynam0]

On some level, privacy is a must in order to have any sense of dignity.

Originally Posted by Reincarnate

The problem is data mining.

This is grounds for a much more interesting discussion imo. With the incredible volume of information there is on the internet, it's so easy to come up with conspiracies and basically any 'narrative' as you see fit. Issues like climate change for instance will constantly be debated since there are vast amounts of supporting evidence for either side. Obviously there is more credibility from one side but let's not get into that. Point is, it will be interesting to see how the digital era will play out in creating a damaging image of government.

[dAnceguy117]

I know rather little about the subject of ethics. Some ethical theories and principles hold up logically in a higher number of situations than some other ethical theories and principles. Still, when debating whether some action is ethical or unethical, the answer depends at least partly on the set of ethical beliefs to which one subscribes, correct?

Internet monitoring and other forms of privacy invasion seem intuitively "wrong" to most of us. As Rubix and Plopadop have done in this thread, we can explain how internet monitoring doesn't produce accurate results and can induce discomfort or even paranoia among internet users. Dynamo also highlighted the topic of data mining, which I agree would make for a compelling discussion.

I find myself in the same boat as Shadowcliff. Even though internet monitoring and data mining feel unethical to me, I would have a difficult time trying to articulate my position. Can we say internet monitoring is objectively wrong? Does factual evidence to support such an argument exist?

When someone holds an opposing opinion on a matter of privacy, what's the best way to reach some common ground before trying to make a convincing argument?

[DossarLX ODI]

Everything ultimately boils down to utilitarianism.

"Would it be better for me to stand up for this man getting unfair treatment and risk getting into trouble myself, or should I do nothing and keep myself safe for now?"

"What would other people think about me if they saw this?"

"Would having this revealed about me possibly be twisted enough to look bad and be used to make me look like a criminal when it really is nothing of the sort?"

"If someone looked through my browser history and saw me google something about how a particular substance works, are they going to use that in a way that I am making a chemical substance to commit a terrorist act?"

The point is, ego & greed/power > ethics. Utilitarian aspects are *always* considered. Why do you think people don't respond if there is someone clearly pointing out something wrong? They *ARE* thinking "is it worth helping him or no?", and I don't care what bullshit anyone tries pulling on this

Privacy very much matters simply because other people can and will use whatever they find, twisting it if it would give them an advantage. Ego & greed/power > ethics.

[infinity.]

Originally Posted by DossarLX ODI

Everything ultimately boils down to utilitarianism.

"Would it be better for me to stand up for this mean getting unfair treatment and risk getting into trouble myself, or should I do nothing and keep myself safe?"

"What would other people think about me if they saw this?"

"Would having this revealed about me possibly be twisted enough to look bad and be used to make me look like a criminal when it really is nothing of the sort?"

"If someone looked through my browser history and saw me google something about how a particular substance works, are they going to use that in a way that I am making a chemical substance to commit a terrorist act?"

The point is, ego & greed/power > ethics. Utilitarian aspects are *always* considered. Why do you think people don't respond if there is someone clearly pointing out something wrong? They *ARE* thinking "is it worth helping him or no?", and I don't care what bullshit anyone tries pulling on this

Privacy very much matters simply because other people can and will use whatever they find, twisting it if it would give them an advantage. Ego & greed/power > ethics.

your supporting quotes are pretty much all rawlsian ethics lol

also this makes no sense

[DossarLX ODI]

How does it not make sense?

Originally Posted by Reincarnate

And so by allowing third parties to milk your data, you're granting them the power to fuck with you if they see fit.

Anyone who gets a hold of your data can twist it any way they want if it will give them an advantage.