Category Archives: Privacy

Definitions

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The Supreme Court has agreed to take up Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which is about a Mississippi law that substantially bars abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The Court’s ruling, whatever they decide, however united or split they decide to be, will substantially impact their 1992 Planned Parenthood v Casey ruling that created a bar against “substantial burdens” on a putative right to abortion and their Roe v Wade ruling of 20 years earlier that manufactured out of the umbras a “right” to abortion.

The Court, though, in keeping with Chief Justice John Roberts’ timidity, is unlikely to decide the matter broadly, possibly even avoiding Constitutional matters altogether. It has taken up, from the several questions in front of the lower courts, only the narrow one of whether all pre-viability bans on elective abortions violate the Constitution.

It occurs to me that even that much hinges on the definition of “viability.”

Here’s the Merriam-Webster Online definition of viability as it pertains to babies:

the capability of a fetus to survive outside the uterus

Roe‘s creation set an implicitly technology-based threshold of the third trimester for its viability standard. There’s nothing in the definition of viability about requiring medical support—or medical intervention of any sort—for the fetus to survive outside the uterus. Medical technology has advanced considerably in the 40 years since Roe; the 15 weeks of Dobbs is within the capability of today’s medical technology.

Texas just enacted a similar ban, but that State’s threshold was set at 6 weeks. That does stretch the bounds of today’s medical technology, but maybe doesn’t exceed them. The Court’s Dobbs ruling will, of course, impact the Texas law if it goes one way. Or, the Court could uphold Dobbs, but say 6 weeks goes too far.

In any event, while the technology basis of Roe‘s threshold is strongly implied, it would be good if the Court in its ruling explicitly stated that the threshold depends on medical technology and can be moved toward conception as medicine increases its ability to sustain fetuses and bring them to term outside the uterus.

Controls

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Governments at the State level (look for this to become nationalized under the Biden administration) are trying to force high school students and their families to give up to those State governments (and potentially to the Federal government) their families’ financial condition as a condition of graduating from high school.

Notice that. Petty academic considerations no longer would be sufficient criteria for graduating from a supposedly academic facility. Letting Government peer into private wallets and purses are about to become a primary criterion for fitness to graduate.

The rationalization for this invasion is to guide more high school students toward college. (I’ll elide, in this post, the idea that college isn’t for everyone; a significant fraction—possibly a majority—of high school seniors would be much better off in a trade school or community college learning a trade.)

The government preferred financial record to be executed, according to these governments, is the FAFSA form—the Free Application for Federal Student Aid—which gives access to government academic grants. In Florida, high school seniors who eschewed the FAFSA form missed out on $100 million in Federal Pell grants, for instance.

What’s not discussed in these coming mandates is that the form also gives government access to our bank account contents. If the goal is to guide more high school students toward college, an alternative answer is for high schools, their districts, and the State and Federal governments to do a better job of publicizing the plethora of Federal (and State, etc) grants and other funding sources. That publicity does not need letting governments to peer into private accounts to achieve.

That alternative is so plain that questions arise regarding why Governments choose not to consider it.

Overreach

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Alphabet strikes again.

Google informs children when their parents are monitoring their account activity, the tech giant confirmed this month, with the company claiming that doing so is a way of balancing the interests of both parents and children.

Such “balancing” is not Google’s call. It’s not the decision anyone or any enterprise can make in place of the parents, with the narrowly bounded exception of a child’s endangerment—which in the present context is what parental monitoring is for. More broadly, the degree of privacy a child has—is accorded—while growing up is a parental decision and no one or no thing else’s. Full stop.

Alphabet, in commenting, pointed to both the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the recently passed UK Age Appropriate Design Code as examples of child-privacy advocacy to which it adheres. This is cynically disingenuous (my deliberate redundancy): Alphabet is not a UN agency, nor is it an arm of the British government. Nor is Alphabet subject to UN proscriptions anywhere or to British law outside of Great Britain.

It’s time to rein in this company. It’s intruded too far into the lives of ordinary Americans, this time unconscionably presuming to take the role of parents, usurping that from a child’s true parents.

Turning Children into Snitches

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This time, it’s Vermont’s Republican governor.

Vermont Governor Phil Scott said during a press conference on Tuesday that schools in the state will include new questions during daily health checks about whether students and their parents attended gatherings outside of their households following the Thanksgiving holiday.

Never mind the carefully high-minded claimed motives for this—it’s trying to get children to denounce their parents to authorities.

This using the Wuhan Virus situation as an excuse to drastically increase government power has gotten ‘way out of hand.

Insufficient

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Recall that Oracle and ByteDance have a proposal on the table for Oracle to take a minority partnership position in ByteDance’s TikTok.  In response to objections to that, some

Trump administration officials are looking to give American investors a majority share of the company that will take over the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok[.]

Senators Marco Rubio (R, FL), Rick Scott (R, FL), Thom Tillis (R, NC), Roger Wicker (R, MI), Dan Sullivan (R, AK), and John Cornyn (R, TX), object to that, too.

Any deal between an American company and ByteDance must ensure that TikTok’s US operations, data, and algorithms are entirely outside the control of ByteDance or any Chinese-state directed actors, including any entity that can be compelled by Chinese law to turn over or access US consumer data.

The Senators are absolutely correct. Any fraction of ownership by a People’s Republic of China company that’s greater than zero is too much; giving, as it would, the PRC’s intelligence community access to all the data TikTok scoops up from the individuals and businesses that use it.