[BadPhormula]

Originally Posted by Florence

The thoughts of what Phorm/webwise can do once programmed to is almost like taking a shower on blackpool prom in the nude. Nothing is left to the imagination all the inner secrets are out no privacy, human rights nothing is left.

No dignity.

Privacy invasion means something different to each of us; it’s a
moving target. When you hear the term you may automatically think
of an invasion by a technology like wiretapping, while others may
think about having their identity stolen. To some it’s an advertising
annoyance, like junk mail, while to others it’s the exposure of private
information, which can be demeaning and undermine their dignity.



In my taxonomy, privacy violations can be viewed as seven sins:
intrusion, latency,deception, profiling, identity theft, outing, and
loss of dignity.



Sin of Lost Dignity

Outing is harmful because it affects a core value—someone’s identity.
A more common privacy harm inflicted by institutions on their
constituencies attacks another core value—self-respect. This is the
sin of lost dignity.

This last sin is the subtlest and the hardest to qualify; human
dignity is the most difficult possession to protect. Comprehensive
privacy legislation is impossible, but even if society tries to craft laws
that will close the most egregious loopholes, in some areas uncomfortable,
yet fully legal, activities could still happen. There will always be places
where technology outruns the law, leaving gaps in its wake. There will
also be cases where an offense is not bad enough to be deemed illegal
but still humiliates the victim. We can easily get worked up when falsified
information that ruins a person’s reputation is bandied about. But what
about cases where information is revealed that is true but is personal,
private, and nobody’s business but the person’s own? How would you
feel if your medical records were public, with every silly question that
you’d ever asked your doctor in plain view? How about a web site featuring
your school essays containing opinions that might be better left in a dusty
box in the attic? Information technology can easily dig up enough
minute but embarrassing information on any of us to leave us exposed
as if we were flapping around in a hospital gown.

Causing the loss of dignity has always been a favorite tactic for
breaking down a group’s spirit. Military boot camp is founded
on this principle. From the first second that new recruits step off
the bus, basic training is a deliberate attack on dignity, primarily
through loss of privacy. The military takes the doors off bathroom
stalls, sleeps everyone in open-bay-style rooms, and subjects recruits
to constant verbal abuses while pushing them past the point of
physical exhaustion.

The poor are historically subject to a similar kind of violation;
lack of privacy is a tool of social control as is its resultant humiliation.
A welfare recipient tolerating detailed and personal interview
questions or a child forced to use a special brightly colored pass to
get her subsidized school lunch is the subject of a public shredding
of privacy that is often a blow to dignity, imposed almost as a punishment
for being needy. The poor have no privacy. In some cases,
the courts perpetuate the idea that poor people don’t have the same
rights as their wealthier neighbors. In the case of Wyman v. James,
the Supreme Court used fraud prevention as the grounds for permitting
welfare investigators to enter a recipient’s home without a
search warrant.76

Technology is also providing new ways for authorities to keep
track of the poor and put them under surveillance. The government
already makes use of SSNs to track individuals receiving welfare,
and it wants to take the tracking to the next level by issuing benefit
cards to track all purchases.77 Plans are underway to create homeless
management information systems, which will continuously
track the homeless and keep extensive personal information in
databases to be shared regionally.78 The likely next step will be RFID
monitoring of the indigent, like tagging bears or game fish.
Even those who can afford to sue for privacy violations often
don’t because they choose to avoid embarrassment and ridicule.
Undertaking a public legal battle virtually guarantees that the
details will be talked up throughout the community

The Rhode Island American Civil Liberties Union sued a police officer
in 2002 on behalf of a woman who was arrested on suspicion of
drunk driving and was then stripped, searched, and left in a cameramonitored
jail cell with no clothes for five hours.

Another type of humiliation and invasion of privacy often
occurs when employees undergo urine testing for drugs. To prevent
tampering with samples, employees are expected to urinate in front
of attendants. Workplace monitoring, in general, significantly
degrades dignity and compromises the privacy of employees.

Dignity comes from self-control. Those who maintain their dignity
are said to hold their heads high and generally have an air of
self-assurance about them. It’s difficult to be self-assured when you
can’t govern what other people know about you and what they will
do with the information, and today technology makes it all to easy
to publish humiliating information, even pictures and video. Privacy
and dignity are twinned, the yin and yang of the human spirit.
It takes monumental perseverance to maintain dignity when privacy
is stripped away.

Charity, government-assistance, and refugee relief workers should
always take their clients’ dignity into consideration. Television coverage
of natural disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, shows the devastation
panoramically but lingers on the contorted faces of the victims,
stripped of their possessions, shorn of their pride. It was a
tragedy when Princess Diana was surrounded by paparazzi as she lay
dying on a Paris street. It was humiliating when a dying George
Harrison was coerced into signing autographs for his doctor’s children.
His family sued because they also saw it as an invasion of his
privacy and a slam against his dignity.

The best way to handle this sin against privacy is through cultural
awareness and reform. Societies need to police themselves by
treating egregious violations of the spirit as repugnant, legal or not.
Truly democratic societies should zealously defend the right of their
citizens, no matter how impoverished or needy, to wrap themselves
in their dignity. Such measures will protect each and every citizen’s
privacy and will lead to the recognition that privacy is as much a
human need as it is a community obligation.

Commandment: Don’t humiliate me with my private information.

taken from
Privacy Lost How Technology Is Endangering Your Privacy
David H. Holtzman





regards