The Demise of Online Privacy & Random Rants

I have long been a proponent of the developer position of 'what appears on my screen is my property'. Copyright law is a valid concern surely. As a function of intellectual property it is essential. Nevertheless infringing on the privacy of the average person to create profiles and collect personal and perhaps the most private of information is not acceptible. I have never understood why a regular postal message has such privacy rights, but an email is like writing a letter from prison. It may (and you should assume will) be vetted by professionals -with the highest medical and scientific training possible (sarcasm). My point here is that people who work in data collection have no idea or experience with the social factors they manipulate. What is worse; to send a picture of my nipples to a friend in a private corrispondance of a jocular nature, or that someone may dig that up some day and reveal my niipples and their sorted history online? I say its far worse to invade people so. Ron Paul recently stated something quite profound in the debates "...if we wanted, yes, we could put a police officer in every living room in american and that might even reduce ALL crime, but then the real crime is against the people themselves by their governmnet." While I certainly agree that, though despised, governing authority is necessary, I am afraid that moreover I side with the globalists in the view that our present national models are provincial. But then that is a very arrogant attitude since 80% of the people of the world are NOT savvy metro-capital 21st century beings yet. They have the potential to become that very quickly now, but there is a serious learning curve required for such drastic changes to a people.



doggie-pooper-scooper

I am and have always been quite fond of Mr Rogers on this topic. Yes, the TV neighbour with the cartigan and slippers who somehow remained single (in character)for some 50 years. Fred, in the real world, he was a minister and a childrens entertainer and he also was a radical open source advocate. He believed we had a right to make mix tapes, especially of public content. If someone, for example, pays for a DVD, why should they not have rights to it in perpetuity, not when a new medium comes out they must repurchase, how is that the consumers fault ? That is market manipulation of the worst sort to have IP everyone wants and resell them the same piece over and ove rjust in differing mediums ? What a rip. With public or educational programs especially, there should be as much encouragement for copying and redistribution as possible. Anyway, I can do the topic no justice, if you're interested you should youtube his congressional testimony. He was totally responsable for the inclusion of a record button on all of our VCRs in the 80s, and tape decks for music, news, state announcements. See part of the privelage of copying is the right to maintain your own life experiences also. You should be able to own whatever films you want for as long as you want and it should be no ones business in the world.Now, with netflix for example, it is a whole new device, you own nothing, they collect complete data. At the end of the day if anything happens to netflix, you got nothing. And it is especially worrysome in this era of electronic warfare potential. An EMP placed in just a few places could destroy large swathes of the internet. Financial records, encyclopaedia, so much, business data, etc... All could be lost and without a well established and well distributed base of public knowledge there is no way to retrieve it. So even though terrorists may use e-mail me or you (generally speaking) are not one of them, so the practice seems somewhat "unwarranted" hah! And that's another thing too, in the name of "you old guys just dont get it, we should do this" the lawmakers of the day are going in the complete opposite direction from everything they claim to love and support. Most congressmen probably very much dislike online intrusion, public scandal, but these people CHOOSE to be put to this scrtiny in exchange for the privelage of service they recieve, you and I are born bound into citizenship, so some allowances of absolute freedom must be maintained. We see all tooo clearly that economic methods seldom enhance the freedom of the many. Religion provides little respite in the modern epoch as well... so where does one turn. Hopefully government, which in most democratic republics is PLEDGED to be the vanguard of mans freedom against greater forces. NOPE, our governments are turning us out and enabeling (if anything) these problems to persist. If is often cited that more people die from lightening strikes or bee stings than terror every year, a statistic to which the security muggles would reply "see aren't we doing a good job?" but the truth is we have no way to judge (based on one event 911) how effective they have been at all. One thing is FOR SURE though, liberty and freedom of person have been and continue to be drastically reduced every day. Thre is almost nothing left of sacred institutions that used to be cultural tells. In canada, the only thing remaining from several cycles of conservative fire sales is healthcare (just wait and see how long that hangs around, its already brutalized) and in america it was FREEDOM. They didn't have jobs, they didn't have any more money, but they still had the dream, the freedom... very quickly that seems to be a lucury of the past. One which, in these austere times, we just cannot afford to enjoy anymore.