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< | Privacy and Transparency | >
> | Privacy and Social Media | | | | |
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< | -- By KurtLyn - 09 Apr 2013 | >
> | -- By KurtLyn - 21 June 2013 | | | | |
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> | The Modern Age Privacy Rights | | | | |
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> | Privacy, generally, is the state of being free from being observed or disturbed by others. Yet in this technological age, it is hard to do anything without being observed or disturbed by others. Therefore, privacy should now refer the degree of control one has over the available information about oneself to others. Technological developments of the last century have been primarily responsible for the rise of the societal importance of maintaining one’s privacy. These developments have come in the form of a double-edged sword, while they certainly protect us, i.e, surveillance cameras, public records, we often have no control how they expose us, i.e, controlling Google results, or public records. Public records that document prior arrests and offenses all bias the court against a defendant finding himself in a similar situation again. But at the same time, public records create a transparency so that others and society can protect themselves from those predisposed to harm. I only see “privacy” in the traditional sense being continually lessened as technology advances. Instead of attempting to resist, we as a society should embrace the exposure social media provides and then benefits for the previously less privileged, with respect to privacy rights, that comes along with it. | | | | |
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< | How important are privacy rights?
I often question how essential are Americans’ privacy rights and find it interesting that the Framers of the Constitution never explicitly wrote out a specific right to privacy. | >
> | "Credible" Sources of information
I believe that any alleged transparency created by public records is often an illusion. This issue becomes more and more relevant as technology starts to increasingly make known personal information about people public. There is a false but widespread belief that information is synonymous with knowledge, the more information you have the more knowledge you have. Yet, with the increase of technological access to information, there is a complementary increased access to misinformation. Additionally, the more information there is, the more information there is to analyze and consequently more opportunities to make mistakes in that analysis. Some sources of information are rightly considered more credible than others; for example, tabloids and the news are not have a low level comparatively low level of credibility because of the known motivations and biases within different news channels. Conversely, public records and court records have the highest level of public perceived credibility because of propaganda that suggests the judge is an impartial arbitrator and that diverse juries produce fair results. Of course, there are exceptions, yet for the most part the decisions made through our agents of justice are taken at complete face value. | | | | |
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< | They were 18th century
people solving 17th and 18th century problems. They had no
foresight about our problems whatever. If you hadn't been subjected
to the myth of the Founding Fucking Fathers, would you even for a
moment wonder why an 18th-century person didn't understand the 21st
century? | | | | |
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> | Why public records are seen as Credible | | | | |
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< | We treasure our right to be safe from warrantless searches, the privacy of our home and all the other protections offered to us against impositions on things we consider private. In addition, we criticize programs like, Stop and Frisk, for imposing on a person’s privacy, racial profiling, and that many of the stops are unjustified. Yet we rarely, give second thoughts or attention to the adverse effects of criminal records and the lack of privacy there nor think about how much discretionary power exists in the criminal justice system. | >
> | The high level of credibility in public records is, in part due to necessity and, also in part due to a misplaced confidence in public officials coupled with societal prejudice against accused criminals and those of low socioeconomic status. The first part comes from the necessity for society to have trust and faith in their agents of justice. Without trust, a system of justice would not function. However, often decisions that are either uncontested or final are misinterpreted as factual or the whole truth instead of simply as a result. This process thus then lends itself far too much to the discretion of our chosen agents of justice. As well as furthers the second part of the problem of misplaced confidence and unreasonable prejudice. Our social systems certainly reinforce the notion to place full confidence in our chosen leaders as we were the ones who chose them. | | | | |
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> | It is well known, history is written by the winners, a concept that which is fully illustrated in most court holdings and arrest reports. There is only one version put down on the record and for the most part, the person being written about has little control over what is being said. In situations like this, others, the court and the police, control the information that will henceforth represent someone else. Furthermore, it is common knowledge that minorities and lower socioeconomic classes are targeted and subjected to harsher searches and suspicion than other classes. Just from this, minorities and others have a disadvantaged level of privacy. Those who can afford it, buy into a higher level of privacy through gated communities, the prestige of higher social standing, paying off the law, affording lawyers and other various types of protections only available to those who can afford it. | | | | |
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< | Why should we concern ourselves with the privacy of a public record?a | | | | |
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Discretionary power
Of course, as law students, within a few days into Criminal Law, we are told of the immense discretionary power of the judge, prosecutor and the police department. But for the average citizen, there is a misguided notion on how the justice system operates, that all the bad guys are in jail and the good guys go free. In class, you posed the question do we really want to have a judge that was moved in their sentencing by seeing some sad children. I think that, in a sense, yes, a judge moved by the dire situation of the children involved, instead of choosing to adhere to supposedly objective minimum sentencing guidelines, is preferable. Because, if we allowed this, we would at least be acknowledging and accepting that the criminal justice system is anything but objective.
No one doubts that. We use juries to find facts.
The Objectivity is an Illusion
The common law system, building decisions and holdings off of prior cases in addition to statutes and sentencing guidelines, is suppose to, at least on its surface, keep the justice system fair.
Why has "fairness" been
made a synonym of "objectivity"? Surely that's not the way we use
the terms in real life.
Yet, what is fair about the discretionary power left to the officers, maybe necessary but not fair. The differences in societal treatment between being an ivy-league fraternity brother having been found to have done lines and lines of cocaine and an underprivileged minority smoking crack are immense. This societal treatment permeates the supposedly objective justice system on all levels, the judge, prosecutor and the police. From the start, the subjectivity of an officer enters a person’s case, whether or not the officer has been having a bad day, feels like being a dick, all are about to impact the accused. And its not so much that the officers often target innocent people, the problem lies in how many people they let go unreported. We as a society feel that the transparency with criminal records, background checks, and sex offender listings are necessary and beneficial. But what these processes actually do is cloud the actual reality with this supposed transparency and instead, give privacy rights to some and not to others. Those that fit our societal mold for what we consider a good citizen, maintain their privacy rights while those that rub our moral compass the wrong way don’t.
Maybe, but why would
we agree to make criminal justice records stand for the whole of
the social system by which privacy is either accorded or denied?
Criminal justice is merely one among legal processes, which are a
few of the many forms of social action that affect the several
distinct things we call "privacy." You're not explaining what you
mean by privacy, what the social systems are that you are using
the criminal justice process to illustrate, or what the issue of
social inequalities in the use of police officer discretion to
arrest have to do with any of the kinds of privacy you mean.
As a society we are unbelievably hypocritical, the well-to do parents of children who run into trouble with the law, alcohol and drug related, are more than ready to do whatever is possible to influence the situation so that it affects their children in the least way possible.
So are the less well to
do parents of children. Parents try to protect their children as
they can. What's hypocritical about that?
They do so not because they believe that their child is innocent, but because they know of the reputation a tarnished arrest record carries, yet even so, they will still continue in their judgment of others, especially minorities, faced with similar charges. This system is fundamentally flawed; the statistics of minorities in jails support this.
That's not a
self-evident statement. What would constitute the statistics
demonstrating a not flawed system?
And I believe the problem in part originates from the imbalance of where we expect privacy and where we desire transparency, that manages to create a cycle that continues to disadvantage a specific group of the population.
Those with the least
privacy are those with money to spend but who spend it themselves
under their own names. These we might refer to as "the middle
class." Why is it that you believe the privacy of the poor is
particularly at risk? | >
> | Social Media and its Beneficial Effect on Privacy Rights
This is where I believe Facebook and social media have begun and will continue to reduce the discrepancy between the privacy rights of the upper class and the other classes. Facebook and other social media, begin to level the playing field as they cut through privacy protections given to those that can afford these protections. The development of social media and photo sharing sites puts everyone’s information out there, to the point that their quotes, videos and photos are essentially digitally etched into stone. The increased amount of information in addition to the increased spread of information dilutes the pool of current information in a way that only advantages those with previously lesser privacy rights. It allows for more consistent exposure to the things that we used to want kept private to the point it becomes commonplace. This is most notable in drug usage; for example, minorities and members of the lower class are overwhelmingly charged with drug related charges in a way that is out of sync with the ratio of actual drug usage of society as a whole. This discrepancy is due to the ability of those who can afford it to keep private their usage through the protections aforementioned. However, as these classes continually share and allude to drug usage through social media, society’s moral compass will acclimatize to drug usage generally and lessen prosecutions and sentencing against those. | | |
In Conclusion | |
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< | From birth, the upper classes already have enhanced privacy rights, which only increase as they get older so long as they stay within the mold of a good citizen.
No evidence has been
shown. The only thing that has been asserted, not shown, is that
such people have a lower chance of suffering criminal arrest or
conviction than is proportional to their fraction of the population.
(Not only haven't you shown this is true, I'm not sure you've even
given a reason to believe it is true. You have said only, I think,
that among the poor, some people are more likely to be subject to
criminal process than others.)
On the other hand for many disadvantaged minorities, the privacy rights are lowered and they have to continually attempt to prove society wrong. In our society, the things for which we allow transparency for, such as arrest records are largely of little consequence to the upper levels of society, yet substantially impact lower minority groups. Then we protect the privacy of income, spending and operational practices of many of those in the upper bracket, a thing of little consequence to those in the lower bracket. So, in my opinion our nation’s desire for privacy stems from a desire to limit the position of minorities while consistently protecting those that recognize the dangers and advantages of societal privacy and transparency.
I think if you want
to write about privacy, you should try to make your words more
precise, and your sociology more general. Writing about privacy
on the basis of a single social process producing one relatively
granular kind of information about only one fragment of the
population is not likely to lead to very informative results. You
should explain what you mean by privacy, what social structures
maintain it, and what social structures interfere with or destroy
it. You should be careful, if you are talking about the
"autonomy" component of privacy, to discuss the private,
commercial forms of surveillance and data-mining that are anterior
to the public forms. You should ask about the social distribution
of commercial surveillance, and its relation to the uses made of
public data.
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> | Social media as it advances will continue to counter these alleged legitimate and credible sources of information. It allows all classes of people to control to some extent the availability and content of information about them unlike before. It reduces the level of privacy of the higher more closely to the lower classes without adversely affecting them. More equal levels of privacy and exposure will hopefully remove false distinctions between the classes that lead to prejudice. | | |
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