Privacy Harm Is Harm

Don't they state pretty clearly the actual harm that is occurring due to undermined privacy?

There's more words than just the headline. You don't have to agree with them, but they're there.

I get the feeling you’re saying this because the harm caused by privacy loss is complicated, uncertain, time offset, etc, while “harm” feels to you like losing $100 or getting punched. You should think about the 1960s civil rights movement. Imagine you’re in the midst of it, without the hindsight of settled history, with actually many authority figures telling all these silly “activists” to get a real job and stop making such a fuss about something we all got on fine without until they started on their tantrum. What thought process would you need in order to correctly analyze whether the things being fought against were genuinely harms? What is the result of applying that thought process to privacy?

This is, by the way, playing catch-up, privacy has been an internationally recognized human right for many years. I’m just trying to help you see human rights from a perspective other than “something somebody is ordering me to care about”.

You could switch the analogy and just harm people that remove your privacy. I'm much more fond of that route.

We've lost a great deal of nuance in our discourse by taking our previous richly varied and gradated universe of wrongnesses and projecting them all onto the "safety/harm/consent" axis.

It's as if we're no longer capable of conceiving of something that is bad independent of that thing causing harm. Consequently, in order to express sophisticated moral concepts in our guttural pidgin of a moral vocabulary, we need to use combinations of words that are facial absurdities, like "privacy harm is harm".

I'll summarize your argument: You don't have privacy in public.

I agree.

> If you can't get me to care about this "privacy" issue, your narrative is screwed, because I'm in a vehemently pro-freedom libertarian demographic.

your assertion of credentials is thoroughly countered by the information which is shared in your profile.

This is one of those things that's annoying to talk about, reason about, and legislate against because our intuition fails us when thinking about emergent behaviors. Some examples:

1. OKAY: Telling your boss that you saw his car with his license plate on the freeway.

2. WORSE BUT STILL NOT BAD: Telling some friends and coworkers how crazy it is that you ran into your boss's car on the freeway.

3. NOT OKAY: Using a camera network to report on your boss's license plate location in real time.

4. VERY NOT OKAY: Using that extra information to conclude that his wife is pregnant and that he's job searching, selling him out at your current employer for some financial advantage.

5. EVEN WORSE: Doing that to literally everyone, coupled with a side of illegal and scammy advertisements just for good measure.

Our society depends heavily on some things staying reasonably private. You're right a single piece of license plate information isn't that important. What's happening though is some combination of:

1. Attempting to combat companies who don't give a rip about privacy and are keen to exploit loopholes (and for a host of other reasons), the law is stricter than it needs to be.

2. Once somebody else has committed a felony you usually have a lot more leeway with respect to your ensuing actions. Unless you've ever frowned in the direction of Trump, no prosecutor will hold that against you, and nearly every judge will throw it out. You'll want a stronger example.

my license plate is only relevant if an accident happens or i violate some traffic law. in the same way that others involved in the accident will want me to reveal my identity which is not public either. in a perfect world where everyone is honest and no one makes mistakes, we would not even need license plates. but that does not mean that other information that can be deduced from the license plate, such as the time and location or my route, also my home and my workplace, should be available to anyone who asks for it.

You're coercing EFF's point (corporations are tracking people's movements and building a database of people's whereabouts and connections using license plate scanners, and that's an issue) into a very different one (license plates should be a private information).

Of course, that leads you to a flawed conclusion.

> because I'm in a vehemently pro-freedom libertarian demographic.

That demographic hasn't had a very good track record on privacy recently, has it?

When you write down a license plate number you're not surveilling the owner of the car. The privacy being talked about here is being lost in the crowd—you're not protected from someone looking for your license plate but you are protected against some corporation or the authorities knowing everywhere you go in real time with perfect accuracy and recall.

Oh yeah. Regimes also figured this out. Make the preferred outcome the most convenient, delay or hide the negative feedback, and there we go, please choose the system on their own volition.

It’s because companies deliberately make the privacy option constant friction. When the options are “yes” and “ask me again repeatedly” it’s not surprising people eventually give up and just say yes to everything.

It needs to be part of the law that companies are simply not allowed to abuse your data like they are currently. The GDPR was a good start, but it needs to keep going much further.