Privacy Is Dead, Long Live Our Rights of Participation

It might be a good time to contemplate, as the FBI, Apple and Google fire up their weapons of mass wrong-headed defense, why it is that privacy is not included in the Constitution. You know that, right? It is a Supreme Court construction and extension designed primarily to enable individuals to always have the ability to get rich off of their ideas -- the latter part of that life, liberty, and pursuit-of-happiness thing. Perhaps the Founding Fathers wanted it this way and left it ambiguous for a reason? Worth considering, this!

From this thinking, consider: All of the parties in the current Apple break-in dispute might well be wrong. Might all of them better expend their time and resources worrying less about getting into a single phone -- assuming no deception on the FBI’s intent -- and looking more at the future that is now taking the place of the assumptions of the past.

The era of privacy is long since dead. What we need is a new, unified, globally agreed upon path towards developing a platform of rights and privileges associated with social participation. It isn’t what we hide or can hide that is important. What is as undeniably as true now as it was with the creation of the concept of privacy is the value our culture hold for what we share, why we share it, how we respect the sharing by and with others, and what guarantees come from playing the sharing game fairly. Unfortunately, that got lost. Rights of Participation would readily bring such an awareness back.

Though somewhat of a different topic, I want to make a point using the healthcare debacle we’re struggling through. America expends an enormous amount of time and resources NOT providing healthcare but arguing about what a system should look like to protect business and profit motivations that give access to some and deny others who want a share. Were this not the case -- were we most interested in just providing care -- so many problems would go away. We might even find that our attention turns rapidly to building a system that meets the needs of better treatments, affordable meds, preventative practices, etc. Instead, as a culture of mutual interests, we debate the old, made-up construct of insurance and ungodly profits.  

Think about this same thing in regards to the perspective of privacy. The debate heading our way fronted by the titans of corporate and legal self-interests will center on protecting tidbits of our right to security, not the larger issues of the things we do together to make life work for conveniently. Keep this up and we just get trapped once again in the nitpicking that characterizes our poor, behind-the-times health debate.

What would be a better, more inclusive focus would be our general acceptance that we live in a social game. Like it or not, we need to acquiesce to the fact that we have to trust (and expect trust in return) from others, and that in the long run that works best for us all when we profit from have collective rules and expectations of togetherness. If it is possible to construct selfish rules, it is possible to construct cooperative ones that benefit many interests.

In saying this, I know that there is always a danger in using social control to extreme. The collective can abuse its power just as are some individuals. Right Bernie? Funny how this seldom comes up.

Anyway, we can deal with this too. We simply have to learn to work together and build (using open-source, participatory steps) a Rights of Participation user kind of agreement of sorts -- a set of expectations that, over time, the masses of humanity come to accept as our bible of righteous togetherness. If we don’t, legal or corporate contenders are going to do it for us and then get the imprimatur of SCOTUS, sealing this approach just as it did with the privacy construct.

This is exactly what the US government (and particularly an Obama administration and it’s female successor) ought to be doing to lay a foundation for a collaborative and empowering cyber defense and empowerment strategy. What we learn from the new software technologies and the Internet of Everything should be the foundation for making all things better, not more selfish. Taking a bite out of Apple serve no purpose in this regard.

When the Supreme Court justices of the past decided that privacy was a mysterious concept buried within the Constitutional, they made decisions that formed around that perception. This is the heart of a living document. But that doesn’t mean such decisions are always correct or can live forever. It is time for an upgrade that values the fact that we all profit from participating together.