Re: search engines: right to be forgotten, sitemap.xml proposed solution

On 14/12/2012 8:42 AM, David Singer wrote:
> All these *little* nuances have very strong consequences for the social glue.
That is a key observation...the little nuances are a strong factor in 
the social glue.
>
> True, but I am still trying to find the principles underlying these questions.
>
>
> Don't get me wrong, I also react very negatively to the surveillance society, but the principles here do puzzle me.  What we seem to be saying is that we always had these principles, but in physical life we didn't bother to exercise them much because of things like the nuances you mention above. Is that really true? For example, I seem to recall that truth is a defense to a libel action.
>
> David Singer
> Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.
>
  David: I'm not a legal expert but there may be some relevant 
philosophy written around the early cases of product liability and class 
action. Before the industrial age (mass production), the law around 
manufacturer's liability for damages resulting from faulty/harmful 
product was an ad hoc affair very much specific to the moment and 
circumstances. This was practical since most goods were produced at 
human scale. If the blacksmith did a terrible job on the wagon wheels, 
and the wagon crashed into the pottery shop, a learned judge could sort 
it out using well-accepted notions of justice.
But with the rise of massive manufacturing combines, where thousands of 
people participated in the "production" and potentially millions could 
suffer consequences, determining and settling liability and damages 
required a completely different social strategy.
The recent discussion on this thread seems to have been hunting around 
for the philosophical base on which to construct a fair and practical 
notion of privacy ("the principles underlying these questions"). It is 
inevitable that we should end up using our individual, common experience 
of social interaction as a starting point.
But when we're talking about the massive "machinery of observation" that 
is flooding through our lives at the moment, I think it's fair to say 
that there is a *categorical difference* between the normal state of 
small-scale, human-led observation/forgetfulness and the 
machine-augmented, corporate-centric processes we are all too aware of 
at the moment.
We should be very mindful of this categorical difference when discussing 
what's right and what's socially acceptable...what works at the personal 
scale is probably quite irrelevant in these new territories we're 
working to reify.
Kind regards,
JB

-- 
John Brisbin
Managing Director, BoaB interactive Pty Ltd
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Received on Friday, 14 December 2012 22:40:24 UTC