Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Mozilla & Google behind the scenes payola

[Holly Bostick <motub@planet.nl>]

Antoine schreef:

> How would you feel if a company bought lots of
> too-small-to-be-readily-visible flying cameras (like the mosquito-cams
> in the Dan Brown book Deception Point :-)) and followed you around
> wherever you went (in these "public" places, which would certainly
> include shops but not the bathroom...)? Without you being conscious of it?
> Very useful to follow someone around to get their (window)shopping
> habits, and almost certainly completely illegal. How are these different
> (apart from legality)?

OK, now explain to me why they are "almost certainly illegal".

My guess is because humans are made very uncomfortable by constant
observation-- i.e., a lack of solitude, which condition is ever
increasing. You are almost never alone; in fact one must really go out
of one's way to be 'alone' in today's world. You are always reachable,
if you have a cell phone. With video phones now here, you're not only
reachable, but visible. No more picking up the phone naked and unkempt.
Because, as social animals (and curious ones), we find it hard to resist
picking up the phone when it rings.

So this discomfort has been codified into law in some fashion (or
several fashions), since we refuse to stop the march of technology (or
slow the expansion of the human race, which is eating away at our
ability to be 'private', which essentially means 'alone with our thoughts'.

But this is a social issue masquerading as legalities. Because the
actual fact of someone knowing where I shop (which many people know,
without me being conscious of it) is not relevant to anything. *It
doesn't matter if anyone knows this*, except insofar as they choose to
use the information in a way that I'm not happy with, which is a fact of
life on Planet Earth-- some proportion of people will use the
information they have in a way I'm not happy with. The real issue is
that knowing that such constant observation is occurring, without our
active consciousness of it, or ability to control or limit it, *makes
our skin crawl*, which is a human thing. That doesn't make it "bad" (in
some eternal sense), any more than the fact that most people have a
'natural' fear of snakes (all snakes, even the harmless ones) makes
snakes "bad".

I understand that things that make our skin crawl are a 'problem' that
we have to solve in order to manage a society successfully, but there's
a big difference between 'agreements that humans make with each other to
make our lives bearable' and 'natural law' (i.e., inalienable rights).

I just wish we'd stop confusing the one with the other.

Holly
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