The conflicts and tensions between the net generation and the offline legislators are just escalating. The legislators are sitting on all the force, but the net generation is sitting on all the future. With the recent revelations of wholesale spying and surveillance by the United States’ NSA, these tensions have been brought to light again.
People and legislators who were born into the offline world were so through none of their choice. Nobody holds, or should hold, them responsible for being an offline-born. However, people should – and do – hold them responsible when they’re not even making an effort at understanding the net generation and dismissing their demands of privacy and dignity. Listening to lobbyists of big corporations does not count, even if those lobbyists call themselves “stakeholders”. They, too, are offline-born, and will just tell the legislators that the net needs to be curtailed more because it disrupts their business by allowing the competition to do the same thing at one-tenth the cost.
It isn’t just the United States and the NSA spying on their citizens in this manner. The European countries’ security forces do it too, and we know it all too well, even though it probably won’t mentioned too much in election campaigns.
The demands from the net generation of basic privacy, basic respect – even basic dignity – is just getting louder in the face of these egregious privacy violations. Unfortunately, it is usually met with undeserving disrespect from the offline-borns, legislators and lobbyists alike.
All too frequently, we hear people who were born in the offline world scoff at demands of privacy from the net generation, and hear the offline-born elders say things along the lines “They give all their privacy away on Facebook anyway. How could they possibly value any kind of privacy? It cannot be a big deal that we go in and take the rest of it by law.”
This statement, no matter its exact wording, is as prevalent as it is shockingly ignorant and arrogant. It ignores one of the most basic distinctions we make: doing something voluntarily, or being forced to do it against your will. It does not make a difference between voluntary action and forced action. Imagine those offline-borns giving the following statements, which all have the same lack of that important distinction:
“This old lady is giving some of her money away for free to charities she picks. Obviously, she doesn’t care to keep her money, so it can’t possibly be a big deal that we take the rest of her money without giving her a say about it.”
“These people are having sex with a lot of people. Obviously, they don’t mind having sex with other people, and that gives me the right to have sex with them, by force if necessary.”
If these two statements come across as shockingly arrogant to you as an offline-born, then you need to learn and understand that the first statement, which treats privacy as up for grabs, is perceived exactly as shockingly arrogant to the net generation.
These two statements are semantically equivalent to the first one, highlighting the atrociousness that results when people arrogantly dismiss the difference between voluntary action and forced action. The rights violated in the last two statements are as important – legally, philosophically, and emotionally – as the right to privacy. Yet, offline-born legislators seem utterly incapable of understanding the difference between free will on one hand and force at gunpoint on the other when it comes to giving up details about one’s privacy.
To be super-clear: Just because somebody chooses to be open about some parts of their life voluntarily in ways that the offline-borns wouldn’t, that gives them absolutely no right whatsoever to take the rest of the net generation’s privacy by force.
The offline-born legislators and bureaucrats have been violating the rights of the net generation wholesale, using the most arrogant of justifications. This must come to an end, and it must come to an end yesterday.
The net generation goes to vote in less than a year. They’re now half of the European population, and they’re having exactly none of the disrespect displayed toward them.
Some excellent analogies here, will be sure to utilize them while speaking to offliners in the future. Here’s an analogy I’ve found useful for describing another kind of invasion of privacy:
When walking around in a large city we’re all aware of the fact that people take photos of the environment, and that just by entering this public space one might expect to get caught in the backgrounds of dozens or even hundreds of strangers’ photos. Most of us aren’t bothered by this. But now imagine that one of those strangers are actively following you around, taking photos of you shopping, eating, meeting friends, going home, and then putting these photos up on a wall in chronological order, days in a row, discovering your routines, habits and social connections. This is the difference between showing up in a stranger’s facebook-feed and the government (or some large corporation) stringing together your metadata to analyze your behavior. It’s the equivalent of stalking.
Thats not the entirety of the issue.
Foremost the difference is between having these technologies available to the public, the people, and having these technologies available to the state.
Why do I not rail against Google Glass? Because its a public device, its not a spy-drone, its not the NSA listening in on my conversations, its not the Kinect observing me in my sleep.
Contrary to what the US legislature believes, corporations and other collective institutions are not people and this is where the problem lies. There is a difference in a stalker and the police stalking you. A private person has the power (physical, monetary, etc) to do certain things, a collective institution like the government has these resources times a trillion.
Its an issue of power-imbalance, there is a difference between surveillance technology (like Glass) being prolific/available to the public and directed government surveillance on a massive scale.
There is nothing stopping me to look you up on the internet, nothing illegal, just some good old detective work in the digital, matching up mails, names, contacts, sifting through the information left over by you either by ignorance or on purpose. Similarly there isn’t anything to stop me in the real world to do the same as long as i do not directly invade your privacy (going through records, assembling images, interviewing your friends, etc.)
The issue really only comes from the power imbalance that organizations bring with themselves, especially in our society/structure where the government has the monopoly of violence.
The Google Glass in combination with “the cloud”, secret source code computer programs and government spying on innocent citizens, will make the user of the glasses a government informer.
To put it in perspective. It is said that around 10% of the population in former DDR sometimes in their lives, forced or willingly, where informants to the Stasi, the NSA of the DDR. Now think of that in terms of all people using Windows, Facebook, Google or whatever american products or services used for computing or communication. All those companies have to obey under American law and obey the wishes of the American industrial (un)security complex.
This is not about people in power that does not understand, it is about imperial power with a uniopolar agenda, the full spectrum dominance, and just as it was behind the iron wall, anyone with ambitions have to obey under it or they wont be able to make a career, or fall down the steps. This is where we are now, and this is why most countries bow under American bullying (most of the time the USA do not need to bully, we are past that threshold).
The problem with Google Glass is that it will upload everything to the Google cloud (I’m sure there is an option to disable this “feature”, but it will be enabled as default, and the normal user will never turn it off because they have no idea what it means).
I mean, what good is augmented reality if there is no realtime connection? Everything you see, Google will see (and hear). And everything Google see (and hear), they save.
Google Glass is the end privacy. From now on, you can never know if you’re being recorded and broadcasted. And this is of course Googles wet dream.
To put it simply, you’re wrong.
Being photographed hundreds of times, at least if the resolution is high and the face is visible, and those photos published oti, is far worse than being taped by a similar amount of regular CCTV-cameras that save the video locally for a couple of weeks.
CCTV-camera footage is rarely even viewed except for if a crime has been committed.
The internet can be searched by governments and stalkers alike, with facial recognition tools that makes a map of when and where someone or everyone has been. The mapping tool can even be automated and public so that everyones movements are searchable.
That is why I want to put regular CCTV on a privacy breach scale from 0-10 on a 4 and widespread use of Google Glass for photo- or videoblogging on 12. The NSA Prism program would be a 9.
Often, CCTV is viewed real time. I know – I was stopped and searched by Police.
I’m from the UK. By your language (regular) you’re from the USA. What you say may apply in America – but, surprising as it may seem to you, that isn’t the whole world.
Actually, I’m from Sweden, and I neither envy UK nor US citizens. Here, CCTV cameras on the streets are very rare, but most stores and almost all gas stations have it.
Having one or a few people getting paid to watch in real time is nothing compared to every minute of one’s life being published on the internet and searchable for everyone. Widespread adoption of Google Glass and similar technologies will have that effect.
The US Trapwire system I would say is a 10 on the same scale as before.
Thanks both of you,
I am offline born, but very concerned about these developments.
Good analogies.
As am I (offline-born – 1972), but I needed a term that establishes the offline-born legislators as lacking in a way that they can register on an intuitive linguistic level. The problem isn’t old farts who understand the technology, the problem is old farts who take pride in their ignorance about it.
(By definition, those who built the net were born in a time when it didn’t yet exist, and you can’t reasonably claim they don’t understand the net…) 🙂
Cheers,
Rick
The point isn’t who *understands* how the net works. I can assure you most online-born people have no clue either. The point is that online-born people are the first generation who can take for granted free and practically-unlimited information and communication. You can’t built upon something until it has become almost an assumed, reliable resource. All progress and all innovation is built upon the work of others. What these old, gray crones are doing is trying to take away the notion that the internet is open and mostly uncensored. How can you build on top of foundations that are being destroyed, censored and over-regulated underneath you (ok the analogy breaks down somewhat here)?
This is a great argument, which more coherently expresses one I have been making in various forms for years, especially regarding Facebook et al. It is striking that it is assumed that all people from my generation have social networking pages, as well.
Also, in the third paragraph, where you say “even though it probably won’t mentioned too much in election campaigns.” should be “probably won’t be mentioned.”
I think it is a mistake to think the issue is about offline-born versus online-born, although that is an interesting terminology. Many of those of us offline-born are more likely to use decentralized solutions that involve some know-how, like hosting our own email instead of posting over Facebook. The critical factor is whether one is interested in liberty or not. As Lord Acton said long ago: the friends of freedom have always been few. The Internet has not changed that. Associating anti-freedom people with old fuddy-duddies because some old fuddy-duddies approve surveillance misses the essence of this. You are not against “old people”.
Your Obama rights: Anything you say, share, or link to online will be used against you in a secret court of secret law.
Good analogies overall but the offline-born may not understand it. I think the forced/voluntary dichotomy works well here without any analogies. Let us think Facebook. Most people seem to think everything you post on Facebook is public somehow but it is not true. I choose what will be uploaded and what data will be made public. Even within facebook tons of messenger discussions take place every minute and they are never made public.
Why? Because people need privacy to talk to each other. Phone calls need warrants and reasonable suspicion/evidence to be allowed and they are not broadcast publicly for a good reason. And if I want I CAN record the phone call and make it public. Even then I’ll need to ask the other party if I want it. Sometimes when you want to talk to someone privately you’ll go to a more isolated place, sometimes you won’t mind strangers overhearing what you are talking about. Facebook gives this same option (direct messenging being the more isolated place).
And ultimately even if you do make some stuff available to your contacts it is STILL NOT PUBLIC. You are comfortable with sharing the material with your contacts and it’s no different sharing a pic of your trip on facebook than showing your friends the picture physically. You haven’t given up privacy when you put things on facebook just like the offline-born didn’t give up privacy when they showed their photo albums to their friends. Just because more than one person has seen or knows it does not mean you automagically have no privacy.
Your writing is cryptic and difficult to understand. You should work on making it more clear.
You should read more challenging material, so that you’re not intimidated by the use of polysyllabic words.
Wow. As an offline born I always thought how LITTLE online borns care about privacy “forced” or not.
When Google first came online all the online borns (or not even born) jumped on and when confronted with the fact that google will now everything about you they just shrug and go oh well
All the offline born were concerned about letting someone (like Google or an online ad network) no everything about them. After all we used to watch broadcast television and they never new what you, personally, liked an ad or a product.
Offline born consider the entire idea of walled gardens of content an affront to humanity. Information should be FREE regardless of the efforts of authors or record or movies studious
The only way this works is if you completely give up your privacy. The money has to be made somewhere doesn’t it? — an offline born would say. You online borns are giving away your privacy for an awefully low price.
Generalizations, son!
Not all of us are ignorant, fiddle-faddle, highschool cheerleader airheads. There’s a surprising number of us who care about privacy and the free exchange of information/electrons- as long as it isn’t *OUR* information being exchanged (by state actors or not). We use crypto (Like TextSecure), we’ve built darknets (with RetroShare or WASTE), we’ve hosted our own social networks and email-
Some of us even use VPNs, adblockers, privacy tools, and all that rot. We’ve been forced to tunnel outside of school spy-networks, so we’ve got experience in circumventing “Great Firewalls”.
Of course, I’m mainly talking about the 1%- the 1% of students in Canada to graduate from a cyberschool.
This ridiculous “offline-born / online-born” distinction is totally unnecessary and divisive, and obviously wrong. The EFF, Gnu, FSF and any number of similarly-minded organizations were created by — and are mostly populated and run by — people born before the web. From the look of your photo, it includes you, as well. You have some good ideas, but you lose credibility with this kind of inflammatory nonsense. I urge you to drop this trope from your discourse. It might serve as bait to generate some short-term traffic but it really harms your (our) cause. Seriously. Stop it.
Completely agree with Chris, this isn’t productive terminology, and only serves to divide us further. Stop it.
It isn’t ‘online-born’ vs ‘offline-born’, it’s people in power who want your info and whose opinions are broadcast the most => we hear the most, vs the rest of us. Since you’re going to insult ‘offline-borns’ by conflating us with biz and govt who want our data, I’ll say that I’d thought it was you youngsters who didn’t value privacy. Oh and by the way, is Zuckerberg offine- or online-born?
I completely agree with the usefulness of the terms ‘online-born’ and ‘offline-born,’ not so much that there is a difference between us, but in that the younger generation is truly special in the timeline of humanity and has far more power at their disposal than we elders did.
It is not simply that “offline-born legislators seem utterly incapable of understanding the difference” however. That would give them way too much credit, specifically of caring. They likely understand the difference just fine, in the same ratio that they understand anything else presented to them in their pending legislations, but don’t give a flying f*ck for anything that doesn’t make them lots of money.
We all know that the MPAA, RIAA, and lobbyists for many large corporations pay them far, far better than the entire online-born part of humanity could afford to match even if they passed around a hat to every one of them.
Even if it weren’t about bribery, legislators would still flip the bird at all proponents of online privacy simply because these are exactly the people seeking power, and controlling the web is quite obviously a good way to get some.
I’m sorry, but attempting to change the government’s minds about privacy issues is literally 100% impossible from now on. might as well try to change their minds about taxing us for income.
All our hopes now lie in the meshnet and strong encryption.
Sorry, but Moore’s Law will defeat strong encryption, so that’s out.
Not really. Moore’s law is coming to a close unless quantum computing becomes more than a pipe dream. Transistors can’t continue to shrink past the single atom barrier, a wall we are expected to run into by 2018. At that point computers will make only incremental increases in efficiency and power unless and until quantum computing is a reality.
Information Rape!
“This old musician is giving some of her music away for free during some performances. Obviously, she doesn’t care to keep her music to her self, so it can’t possibly be a big deal that we take the rest of her music without giving her a say about it.”
“These people want to spread their music to a lot of people. Obviously, they don’t mind their music being spread to other people, and that gives me the right to spread their music, by force if necessary.”
If these two statements come across as shockingly arrogant to you as an online-born, then you need to learn and understand that the first statement, which treats music as up for grabs, is perceived exactly as shockingly arrogant to the pre net generation.
The stupid, it burns…
No force over other people is needed for me to manufacture a new copy of an object, such as a pattern of a song or movie, using my own property. You still can’t tell basic concepts apart, can you?
Aha, so you want to apply property rights to Intellectual property, interesting. Carry on…
“The stupid, it burns…”
Yeah, it must burn when you read the implications of your own text.
try and read Rick again, he said quite the opposite of what you accuse him of
@Anyone
And what exactly did I “accuse” hime of?
“Aha, so you want to apply property rights to Intellectual property, interesting.”
what Rick said is the opposite, that “Intellectual Property” is not property
@Anyone
Rick wrote “No force over other people is needed for me to manufacture a new copy of an object, such as a pattern of a song or movie, using my own property.”
So Rick most surly claims he has some form of ownership of the property that involves pattern of a song or a movie since he claims it is his property, he even claims the IP being an object.
If repeating what Rick has written is an accusation, then I have most surly accused Rick of doing so, especially since Rick well indeed did write the above.
How come you edit your own comment and at the same time remove mine?
So, you want to implement property rights to intellectual property, interesting. carry on.
Sorry abt above comment, my browser seem to have hiccups.
…well, no force over other people is needed for the government to collect all my private data on the internet. They are just using their own property to find it and make copies of it…
You can “keep the music to yourself” all you want, how you gonna get any fans then?
Look… There is a really simple way to handle all this tracking. Let’s make a list of companies behaving badly with regards to privacy. I’ll put Google on top, closely followed by Facebook. You go ahead and fill in more… Ok? The next step is to stop using their services. It’s really that simple.
I use Google for three things. Throwaway email accounts, sometimes search (I’ve started using DuckDuckGo) and my Android phone (although I don’t sync anything).
I’ve never touched Facebook and I will never do.
One very ironic thing is that privacy is preached all over this blog and when I view the source code of this very web page, the first thing I see is Google Analytics. So Rick, you are actively contributing to the tracking of all your readers. How about not doing that?
‘The legislators are sitting on all the force, but the net generation is sitting on all the future’
and that is exactly what the legislators fear. they will not have the control that they are used to having. they will not be able to stop things from happening as they did in the past. we’ve seen the entertainment industries do the things they do for this very reason. they want to live in the past. to me, that’s fine. what i dont want them to do is force me to stay in the past with them! i dont want governments to give as much help as possible to industries like this to help them keep me in the past. if governments are so afraid, as i think they are, of the future, then they shouldn’t be governing! the trouble there is, they want the power, the wealth etc without having to deal with what lays ahead. they have no balls, in other words! why is this surveillance of ordinary people going on? for the same reason. fear of the future. this talk of terrorist plots is just so much bullshit to try to get people to accept what the governments are really up to. that is trying to stop them from being kicked out of office! if/when that happens, it’s gonna take a whole lot of nerve and a whole lot of deaths, because i am convinced that when the people do wise up completely, the only way for governments to stop them will be mass murder. locking a few up here and there will only incite people all the more.
“These two statements are semantically equivalent to the first one”
Actually, to make them semantically equivalent you need to take the word “all” out of the first line of the first statement, because if someone has already given away *all* of something then there is no ‘rest of it’ left to take.
…and before anyone erroneously claims otherwise, even the most open/public personae on failbook retain some privacy, because nobody can share every thought that they have ever had (unless google comes up with some goggles that can record your entire mind-state in real-time and starts giving them to toddlers – remember this is now prior art, please don’t actually try that google).
I have one problem with the statement about Facebook: Facebook themselves take a lot of privacy by force, or rather people are stupid enough to throw it to them. That makes your entire point invalid.
It would be 100% accurate if everyone before using Facebook read and understood Facebook’s policies, and Facebook didn’t periodically change them to the worse without prior notice or possibility to act. And, of course, adhered to them.
Most people seems to neither read nor care about the policies and what happens to their data, so it’s not much of a difference for them.
See my old comment #8 (Anonymous) here, on the same subject: http://falkvinge.net/2012/05/05/the-facebook-fallacy/
I think what would be needed for things to change is a huge abuse of millions of people’s data, serious abuse, leading to at least thousands of people being fired, evicted, or left by friends and so on.
I know that it will happen sooner or later, and if I have screwed up with my anonymizing somehow (which is not unlikely, given how hard it is to stay anonymous) I will most likely be fired. Not for anything sexually or in any other way indecent, noone would care about that, but for my sympathizing with, communicating with, and most of all voting for the Pirate Party.
Interesting analogies. Though legislators seem to support those two statements as well.
Governments are taking money by force (as taxes), though I understand that money is necessary to prevent the tragedy of the commons.
But what is horrible is that governments supports rape. Basically because they do absolutely nothing to fight rape culture. About 1 in 5 women have been or will be raped during their lives. The women usually get the blame of being raped, because they wear indecent clothing, because they drank to much, because of how they speak or walk. Even though it is the rapist who acted and used force. Furthermore the women get blamed for ruining the live of the rapist, because they sought justice. And the government thinks that there is absolutely nothing wrong with this reasoning.
Again, facebook is also a horrible promoter of rape and rape culture. They literally stated that images of women breastfeeding are not allowed because these are indecent, while images and movies of women being raped or murdered are perfectly fine, because the misogynist owners of facebook think that these movies and images are ‘funny’.
they are perfectly aware of the difference. they just want to ignore it as and when it suits!
Rick, I think that you have made the very same misconception that you are criticizing. Many of those users who give up (part of) their privacy on Facebook don’t do so voluntarily. Yes, it is true that Facebook allows you to control part of your privacy. However, if you join Facebook, then Facebook will publish large amounts of your personal information without your voluntary consent. I cannot hide my real name or my friends list from others. Facebook forces me to make these public as soon as I join.
Let’s compare this to the telephone system: In former times, the German Federal Post didn’t log your phone calls for billing purposes. All you got was a bill telling you how many units you had used and how many Marks you had to pay. If you didn’t trust the Federal Post, you could rent a rate meter that would receive a signal whenever the post office incremented their rate meter by one unit. You could opt-in for a telephone book listing and eventually, you were also given the right to opt-out from being visible to directory assistance. When CallerID came up, you had to opt-in for outbound CallerID if you wanted to use it. You could write yourself a list of your friend’s phone numbers if you wanted but nobody forced you to post that list in public space. You didn’t have to say your name when you picked up the phone and you needed to opt-in for reverse directory assistance.
Now, let’s compare this to facebook: You have to use you real name and make it visible to anyone. This is equivalent to forcing someone to tell their name to every caller and making everyone visible to reverse directory assistance. You have to make your Friend’s list public. You cannot send anonymous messages and Facebook keeps lists of whom you have sent messages to or received from. You cannot opt-out from this feature. And everyone can find you via their search feature.
You cannot opt-out from any of those “features”. The only way to disable them is by removing your Facebook account. However, if you do that, you cannot use Facebook anymore.
I would like to use Facebook. However, I don’t want those anti-privacy “features”. I want to send Facebook messages to others and to friend them. But I do not want to have my real name and my Friends’ list visible to any random guy!
If I want to talk to Facebook users, I have to give up my privacy. So using Facebook may be voluntary but giving up your privacy on Facebook is not voluntary. Mark Zuckerberg is forcing all Facebook users to do this.
I know more than one person who doesn’t use their real name on Facebook. Although it is “not allowed”, the rule is not enforced.
You give away exactly as much personal information on Facebook as you like, although I agree that most people don’t know the extent of how public their information is being shared (like your photos being used by Facebook for public ads, while you think only your friends can see them)
However, my argument still stands: Facebook only gets what you give. You can have a FB account with 100% false information if you want to!
I have to disagree with you. There were cases of FB accounts closed due to false or phony information. So Facebook does actually enforce this rule.
And “Facebook only gets what you give” is also wrong. Facebook uses to collect data about their users and non-users from other users by soliciting them to upload their address books to FB.
What concerns me is that Facebook makes some information public that they are not supposed to make public. I mean, if Facebook knows something, than that doesn’t mean that I want it to be public. If I join a FB group, I do that because I want to communicate whith the other users in that group. Think of the group as some kind of mailing list. I don’t join the group because I want my group membership to be visible to anybody who looks at my user page. Unfortunately, only the group owner can change this behavior, and I can’t change it on a per-user basis.
I also don’t want anything about me to be found by any search engine, especially FB’s Social Graph search. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as robots.txt on FB.
Your post reminds me of a Facebook Help article that I discovered when I was looking for Facebook’s privacy controls. And what Facebook writes about their so-called “privacy” stuff is an insult. “You can control how your posts on facebook are shared.” Yeah, right. I may be able to control posts, but what about my friends list? I don’t want that list to be public.
Right now, the only consequence that I can take is not to use Facebook. I even blocked Facebook from my hosts file so FB cannot collect any information about me when I surf on sites that include stuff from facebook.
I think that this varies. For instance, at many railway stations here in Germany, there are cameras which are ONLY viewed real-time. No recording.
And these cameras are not even meant to provide security. The railway operator just says they needed them for train operations (e.g. if the engineer wants to watch the doors of their train closing but the platform is curved, so he can’t look directly).
This was supposed to be a reply to 1.2.1
Of course there are people born before the Internet that know how the Internet works – it just didn’t appear out of the blue, but someone had to CREATE it.
The difference between offline-borns and online-borns isn’t by the age, but by about the knowledge of how the Net works: a baby born yesterday won’t know anything about the Internet, and neither will many teens nowadays, while someone born in the ’50s and having seen the Internet since it was ‘born’ will most probably know the functionalities, capabilities and problems of many protocols, programs, pages…
Normally I don’t learn article on blogs, but I wish to say that this
write-up very forced me to take a look at and do so!
Your writing taste has been amazed me. Thanks, very nice article.