Category Archives: Privacy

In Which Illinois Got It Right

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Back in 2008, Illinois passed a law barring companies from collecting customers’ personal biometric information without their prior permission. Companies in Illinois also were required to develop a policy, and make it readily available, that laid out how those biometric data would be stored and when they would be destroyed.

Facebook was accused of violating that law when it decided to use its facial recognition technology to analyze users’ photos in order to create and store “face templates.” Users’ faces are plainly biometric data in this context, the data were taken by Facebook without the owners’/users’ permission, and in 2015, folks sued Facebook over its misbehavior.

Now comes a reckoning of sorts.

Facebook has agreed to settle a $550 million lawsuit brought on behalf of millions of Illinois users who claim the social network’s automated tagging feature powered by facial recognition technology violates their biometric privacy rights.

Good law, and mostly good outcome.

But maybe the class action group shouldn’t have settled. Settlements only bind the parties to the suit and are only as good as the promises of those parties. Facebook has a long history of finding ways to weasel-word around the terms of its settlements, violating their spirit if not their letter.  Court judgments, though, are permanent, binding on all parties to the suit, and binding also on everyone else within the court’s jurisdiction.

We’ll see on this one, but Illinois got this one right with its law.

Harms in Public Spaces

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The Brits are working out a new way to intervene in private lives and in private businesses, this time in an attempt to control “harms” done via (not by, mind you) “online platforms”—social media.

Under the [British] government’s proposal, a new regulator would have the power to require companies to protect users from a number of identified online harms—such as pornography, extremist content, and cyber bullying.

And

[T]he pair talked through the different terms that had been used to describe social media in a legal context, looking for the right analogy. They tried “platform,” “pipe” and “intermediary.” Nothing seemed to fit. Then “we thought of a ‘public space,'” says Ms Woods. “People do different things online. It was just like ‘how do we regulate spaces?'”

“Identified” online harms? We can’t even define the harms—such as pornography, extremist content, and cyber bullying.  Even Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart ultimately walked back his foolish I know it when I see it nonsense, recognizing that such a nebulous “definition” had no place in law.

We have not—we cannot—define any of these harms, much less what constitutes a “public space;” there is no basis for Government regulating these things.

Nor have we succeeded in recognizing who actually is responsible for these harms, whether public or private.  See the disconnect, at a high level, between the Left’s Big Government is responsible on the one hand and the Right’s focus on individual responsibility on the other.

The British government may want to create a whole new, intrusive bureaucratic agency for controlling one more aspect of British citizens’ lives. When we wrote our Constitution and ratified it those two and a quarter centuries ago, we explicitly walked away from the British system of governance for a number of reasons; central among them being the illegitimacy of Government intrusions into private lives.

This is one more example.

Fiscally Sound Socialism

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Richard Rubin posited, in his Wall Street Journal article, some hypotheticals for how Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) might pay for her Medicare-for-All plan. He suggested that one of the ways toward this goal of Medicare-for-All that all the Progressive-Democrats running for President need to do was to

find[] ways to reduce health-care costs

Were Progressive-Democrat candidates serious about this, though, they’d stop conflating health care costs with health care coverage costs, get government out of the way of both industries, and put them both (back) into competitive, free market environments.

Rubin also asked whether

(I) would…support Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare-for-All plan if she presented a fiscally sound option to fund it[.]

The question as phrased is a bit of a non sequitur since it’s virtually impossible for such a thing to be funded in anything remotely approaching a fiscally sound manner.  Leaving that aside, though, no, I would not support her or her “fiscally sound” plan.

Warren’s plan, as with her other plans, are fundamentally socialist. There might—might—be a way to make such a thing fiscally sound, but socialism can never be economically or morally sound.

Socialism can never be economically sound because it caps the performance of the most successful, reducing the incentive to work to one’s potential, and so leads to erosion of output, both individually and in the aggregate across a national economy. Beyond that, socialism puts government in control of production, sales, and purchasing decisions, and government can never be as efficient or as prompt in responding to changing conditions as the totality (or subsets of the total) of private citizens acting on their own needs and wants.

Nor can socialism ever be morally sound. By transferring the responsibility for those production, sales, and purchasing decisions to government and away from the individuals who otherwise would make them, socialism eliminates personal initiative and personal responsibility, indeed, the very concepts of personal initiative and personal responsibility.  Instead of letting men be moral actors in their own right, socialism simply reduces them to wards of the socialist state—which is to say to subjects of the men who populate the socialist state from time to time.

A City’s Attack on Privacy

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You’re aware of the Chicago Teachers Union strike against the city, demanding a ton more money—a 15% pay raise over the next three years (against Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s meek counteroffer of 16% over five years).  Here is another part of Lightfoot’s offer to the union [emphasis added].

1-5.8 Bargaining Unit Employee Information. The BOARD shall provide the UNION on at least a monthly basis, and on a weekly basis for the months of August, September, and October, a list of all current employees in the bargaining unit, which shall include each employee’s first and last name, shift, job title, department, work location, home address, all telephone numbers (including cell phone number if available), personal and work email addresses, date of birth, seniority date, base hourly pay rate (if available), language preference (if available), identification number/payroll code/job number, salary, status as a member or non-member, UNION dues, and COPE payment.

Nor can any school district employee, whether union member or not, opt out of this information grab.

Chicago is no place to live with a city administration that has no respect for its citizens’ personal information, their privacy, a city administration that considers such bits of information to be nothing more than bargaining chips.

In Which Zuckerberg is Right

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Attorney General William Barr has taken up ex-FBI Director James Comey’s battle for government backdoors into private citizens’ encrypted private messages.  Apple MFWIC Tim Cook won a similar fight regarding iPhone passwords and a demand that government should be allowed backdoors into those, and Comey’s FBI was shown to have been dissembling about that difficulty by the speed with which a contractor the FBI hired successfully broke into an iPhone the FBI had confiscated.

Now Barr has broadened the fight, demanding Facebook give Government backdoors into Facebook’s planned rollout of encryption for its messaging services.  He wants Facebook, too, to hold off on its rollout until Government is satisfied it has such backdoors.  Barr’s cynically misleading plaint includes this tearjerker:

Companies cannot operate with impunity where lives and the safety of our children is at stake, and if Mr Zuckerberg really has a credible plan to protect Facebook’s more than two billion users it’s time he let us know what it is[.]

Zuckerberg has been quite clear on what it is.  It’s facilitating private citizens’ ability to encrypt their private messages on Facebook’s platform.  Many of whom live in outright tryannies, others of whom live in so-far free nations, but whose government officials want to be able to pierce the protections of enforceable privacy at will.

The concern that bad guys, terrorists as well as common criminals, will take advantage of such encryption to evade government law enforcement facilities is entirely valid.  Two things about that, though. First is Ben Franklin’s remark about the relationship between safety and security.

The other is for law enforcement to do better with their own IT skills and with their own human policing skills.  Just as the FBI did in cracking that iPhone after Apple refused to give break-in assistance to Government.