If you follow technology issues, you know that 2009 is the year that all of the various “privacy” issues are expected to mature and bloom into new attempts at legislation and regulation.
A basket of issues falls under the rubric of “privacy,” from Internet filtering, packet inspection, behavioral advertising, and data collection and retention policies, and there are legitimate policy problems in each of these areas.
But before getting into the weeds of these various debates, let’s remember some first principles that should govern privacy discussions.
The primary concern of our Founding Fathers, and thus the primary purpose of the Constitution, was to protect private citizens from their government. If we could somehow transport the Founders forward in time, our guess is that, while the Founders may well be concerned about protecting the privacy of citizens from Google, their principle concern would be protecting the privacy of citizens from the government.
If this seems like an esoteric point, consider this news item from the UK: “Police set to step up hacking of home PCs.”
It seems that the UK Home Office “has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain to routinely hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant.” Such “remote searching” would allow police to “examine covertly the hard drive of someone’s PC at his home, office or hotel room”—again, without obtaining a warrant.
Police might install key-logging software on your computer, or send an email containing a secret payload of invasive software. Again, without a warrant.
Of course, these are the same police that have the right to break into your home, beat you into submission, drag you off to jail and confiscate your personal property. Last time we checked, those are powers that Google and others in the private sector don’t command.
We don’t minimize the importance of the various private sector privacy issues, and we have many concerns regarding privacy that we’ll be sharing in coming months.
But, as the debates begin, let’s not lose sight of what should be our most overarching privacy concern—the privacy of citizens from intrusion and abuse at the hands of their government.