Category Archives: Privacy

Blowing Up Settlements

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The one being sabotaged here is between Facebook and the FTC over the FTC’s proposed settlement of Facebook’s “mishandling” of consumer privacy data, including surrendering millions of consumers’ personal information to Cambridge Analytica.

FTC Chairman Joseph Simons has the (Republican) votes he need to impose the settlement, from the FTC’s perspective, on a 3-2 partisan vote.  He’s quite rightly trying to get at least one of the Progressive-Democrats on the board to vote with him, but they’re bleating that a $5 billion fine and other controls don’t go far enough.

This is naked obstruction, though, based on a cynically manufactured beef.

Another impediment to the settlement is a textbook example of why Federal agencies ought not be spring-loaded to settle cases with miscreants.  “Settlements,” should be vanishingly rare, and they should occur only after the teeth from a history of court cases have been manifested.  This time, the block is whether

to name Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a respondent in the complaint that would be filed by the agency as part of the settlement. Naming Mr Zuckerberg as a respondent could make him liable for future privacy missteps—and give the FTC leverage if it should seek to remove Mr Zuckerberg from the company’s management in the future.

Whichever party wants this included, it’s an entirely legitimate inclusion.

“Facebook representatives,” though, object, and they say Facebook will not accept a settlement that includes this.

There’s nothing here for Facebook to accept or reject, though. Facebook screwed up with consumers’ private, personal information, and the screwups identified in this putative settlement are just the latest in a long string of such…errors.  That those prior misbehaviors are not part of this case does matter in determining the price to be paid in this instance, but they should inform the FTC’s willingness to go to court rather than itself settle for a settlement.

There should be no settlement on the table or on offer in any guise.  The case should be in the courts, moving apace—the FTC should not allow Facebook’s lawyers to drag things out, and neither should the courts—with a court judgment sought. That judgment should include, at minimum, a company fine of $5 billion or more, Zuckerberg named as correspondent, and Zuckerberg personally fined for his role as the MFWIC condoning, if not actively authorizing, such privacy invasions and sales.

A Misunderstanding

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Senator Cory “Spartacus” Booker (D, NJ) has one in spades. The article at the link was centered on Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Robert Francis O’Rourke’s mild disagreement with Booker’s position on gun control, but one of the false premises that inform Booker’s misunderstanding was exposed.

Booker argued that just as a driver’s license demonstrates a person’s eligibility and proficiency to drive a car, “a gun license demonstrates that a person is eligible and can meet certain safety and training standards necessary to own a gun.”

First, Booker’s analogy is badly flawed.  A drivers license does not at all demonstrate a person’s eligibility to drive a car. Eligibility to drive comes from the person being a US citizen (or, according to many Progressive-Democrats, from their presence in the US and in a State, whether that presence is legal or not) of a State-determined minimum age, and from no other criteria.  The drivers license then demonstrates a minimum level of proficiency and knowledge of State driving laws. Other restrictions on driving then impact whether the person will be allowed to retain that license; they do not change his eligibility criteria to drive, for getting a license.  Indeed, that license must be granted on a will-issue basis on satisfactory completion of training; licensing courses cannot be used to restrict driving.

On the larger issue, a person is eligible to own a gun and to bear it solely from his status as a citizen of the United States.  Here’s what the 2nd Amendment says:

…the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

There’s nothing in there about eligibility criteria. The only addenda to that are State-mandated criteria related to whether the person has a violent felony history.  All a gun license demonstrates is that State-mandated levels of safety and training standards, which include knowledge of State laws, have been met.  And that license must be granted on a will-issue basis on satisfactory completion of training; licensing courses cannot be used to restrict owning and bearing.

“A Battle for the Soul of this Nation”

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That’s what Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Hamlet’s poor relation Joe Biden, said we’re in as he opened his campaign.

We are in the battle for the soul of this nation[.] If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter….

Indeed, we are in a battle for our nation’s soul. It’s a battle between one party that actively tries to improve the situations of our nation’s citizens—whether we agree with those policies or not—and a party that has no aim for our people’s benefit, but is focused solely on anti-Trumpism.

It’s a battle between a party on the one hand that wants to get Government out of our way, to unleash our individuality and individual entrepreneurial spirit, to restore to us our individual responsibilities and freedoms, and a Party on the other hand that wants to take things away from us: our money in the form of higher taxes; our weapons, under the guise of carefully undefined “common sense”…restrictions; our freedom of speech under the cynically offered guise of suppressing “hate” speech or “terrorism fomenting;” our freedom of religion under the just as cynically offered guise of “protecting” others from discrimination (but not the ones asserting their religious tenets); our morality by growing Government to arrogate that morality to it, thereby destroying it in both places; our individualism by mandating what all of us collectively must do because Party says it benefits some of us—even where it plainly does not—and on and on.

It’s a battle between a party that wants to shrink government and Party, which wants to grow a Government run by Party members who Know Better than the rest of us.

It’s a battle between a party that wants government to work for all of us and Party, which has open contempt for millions of us and insists that us ignoramuses must simply be quiet and obey.

What will be altered—an outcome devoutly to be wished—is what this nation has become under the last 80 years of pressures and outright rule of the Democratic Party and of late the Progressive-Democratic Party: a rapidly growing regulatory state with weakened national security, and a nation damaged domestically by Party’s explosively growing national debt, its racist and sexist affirmative action programs, its gilded welfare cage, and lately its revived segregationist policy of identity politics.

There have been excursions from that trend, to be sure, but they have been only occasional and brief: one party’s successful effort to defeat the Soviet Union via its rapid defense buildup and its current, nascent restart toward rebuilding our nation’s defense establishment, together with the beginnings of a rollback of Party’s imposed regulations governing what Party would permit or require each of us to do.

This is a battle we cannot afford to lose.

Banning Violence and Extremism from Social Media

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That’s what France and New Zealand want to do and want others to join them in doing, all in response to the terrorist murders in New Zealand.  The two intend to host a conference involving G-7 members’ IT chiefs and a separate “technology summit” aimed at getting commitments

to end the use of social media to organize and promote terrorism and extremist violence.

But whose definition of violence? Whose definition of extremism? We’re already seeing, in our nation, the Progressive-Democratic Party and their violence-oriented arms, Antifa and BLM, and their university management team associates, defining conservative speech as triggering, dangerous to mental health, violent.

This is a very slippery slope, onto which the first step may well be fatal.

Privacy in a Technological World

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In a ruling rejecting an application for a search warrant, Magistrate Judge Kandis Westmore, operating in the Northern District of California, had this remark in particular.

Citizens do not contemplate waiving their civil rights when using new technology, and the Supreme Court has concluded that, to find otherwise, would leave individuals “at the mercy of advancing technology.”

Encouragingly, this remark also cited (via the quote in the remark above) a Supreme Court ruling, Carpenter v United States [citations omitted]:

We have kept this attention to Founding-era under-standings in mind when applying the Fourth Amendment to innovations in surveillance tools.  As technology has enhanced the Government’s capacity to encroach upon areas normally guarded from inquisitive eyes, this Court has sought to “assure[ ] preservation of that degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted.” For that reason, we rejected in Kyllo a “mechanical interpretation” of the Fourth Amendment and held that use of a thermal imager to detect heat radiating from the side of the defendant’s home was a search. Because any other conclusion would leave homeowners “at the mercy of advancing technology,” we determined that the Government—absent a warrant—could not capitalize on such new sense-enhancing technology to explore what was happening within the home.

The Founders wrote our Constitution to be technology agnostic, and in fact there is no mention of technology qua technology in it.

Westmore’s ruling can be read here. Carpenter can be read here (it’s long).