Privacy Is Just the First Step, the Goal Is Data Ownership
It's been a while since I disagreed this much with a privacy-related article. It's a good reminder to me that the privacy community is reasonably diverse, and that different people can advocate for the same policies for very different reasons.I advocate for privacy a lot, but my end goal definitely isn't data ownership. If anything, I'd like to see IP protections start to go in the opposite direction. I'm not against the idea of copyright as a purely practical invention, but I certainly don't believe anyone has an intrinsic moral right to a monopoly on creative or factual information.So I take some issue with the idea that privacy is just a gateway to something else. To me, privacy and anonymity are the end goal. There's not a secondary, deeper issue behind that. I'm not mad that Facebook is making money off of my information, I'm mad that they were able to get it in the first place.This is important, because when you transition to talking about data ownership as the underlying problem, then you start to lose ground on questions like, "why is it important that the government not be able to track my GPS location anytime they like? What was really wrong with programs like PRISM?" Because Government privacy concerns don't really have anything to do with data ownership.