21
votes
After 9/11, Americans gave up privacy for security. Will we make the same trade-off after COVID-19?
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- Title
- Will we give up privacy for security after Covid-19? - STAT
- Published
- Apr 8 2020
- Word count
- 2040 words
You know, if we had a President Obama, or even Clinton, or even Romney, I'd probably trust the government to use mobile phone data to help people quarantine. However I have not one single iota of doubt that Trump would abuse this power to further hurt communities of color and activists.
Given that a variety of republican institutions have already been found to be repeatedly doing this, this is almost a certainty.
I wouldn't, if only because once these powers are granted, they're never revoked.
That hasn't worked well for literally any other time emergency powers were granted.
From the article:
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Remember all the rhetoric at the time? 'Don't change your lives or the terrorists win!'
Well...I wouldn't say they won, but they certainly didn't lose by that metric either. The police state gained a ton of power less than 2 weeks after 9/11, and we've been waging an especially never ending war ever since.
You're onto something interesting here.
Additionally, Americans seem very willing to give away plenty of sensitive data to corporations that demonstrably misuse that information way more than the government.
Those who've been trying to propagate the view that giving information to those who want to make money off it is perfectly fine, but giving it to the government is really a terrible, inexcusably bad thing have managed very well. That split isn't nearly as clear in the societies in Europe I know well.
That's part of creating the whole view that government-run things are bad, and government is bad, while private completely profit-focused business is good. It's disheartening to see how pervasive or even "natural" view that is among many.
That's what happens when you let for-profit businesses run your country. They do everything they can to consolidate power.
There is almost always a need for compromise, because people disagree. Some governance mechanism is needed to revolve the disagreement. Some will be disappointed.
I think differential privacy is interesting.
Are there any examples of institutions run like that?
Thanks for giving examples. From what little I know about how they are governed, it doesn't seem like these organizations have governance models with much in common? For example, @Deimos makes all the decisions for Tildes. This is pretty common for small open source projects, but it's not like Debian, which has elections.
It might be interesting to learn about how governance works in practice for different organizations. Too often, the mechanics are obscured by abstractions like "accountability."
Who benefits is a matter of opinion. For example, Google's philosophy has traditionally been to put users first. But you might have a different idea of what that means than they do.
The people who put privacy first and the people who put public health first are both justifying what they do as being for public benefit.
People repeat this constantly, but it's not actually true.
Of course, companies get run into the ground all the time. Investors can sue in cases like securities fraud where the company is hiding information about how poorly they're doing, but it's not illegal to just run a company badly (and definitely not to run it well but not "optimally").
Thanks for the examples, but all of these are pretty small or niche, compared to state-run institutions. Are there any countries that do this at a state run level?