by Joel Schlosberg
http://c4ss.org/content/25160
Julia Angwin (“Has Privacy Become a Luxury Good?” New York Times, March 4), describes the difficulties faced by people trying to maintain the privacy of their personal data. Although an individual can purchase goods and services for the purpose, high cost mitigates their usefulness and availability, not only in the monetary sense but in the amount of effort, time and research necessary to find them and keep them running, and the lack of clear and verified criteria of their efficacy. Drawing an analogy with organic food, and conceding that in both cases market demand has made safer products more accessible and usable, Angwin concludes that the regulatory state is the only means to guarantee them to more than “those with disposable money and time”: “Our government enforces baseline standards for the safety of all food and has strict production and labeling requirements for organic food. It may be time to start doing the same for our data.”
But the parallels to food safety are, on the contrary, a textbook illustration of why the regulatory state cannot be a trustworthy protector of digital privacy.
As a body of scholarship originating from Gabriel Kolko’s “The Triumph of Conservatism” four decades ago has explained, food regulation in the United States has always primarily promoted the industrialized, highly-processed food production model of the large-scale businesses that have always had chief influence over it. Even when regulation “enforces baseline standards for the safety of all food,” the implementation imposes as many of the costs as possible onto smaller businesses and off larger businesses. It also preempts demands for stricter voluntary safety standards, sometimes even overtly ruling them out, such as when small meatpacker Creekstone Farms Premium Beef was blocked by the U.S. Department of Agriculture from testing all of its cattle for mad cow disease. And ever since, safety regulation has been favored by big businesses during safety crises to establish minimum standards adequate enough to regain public trust, but lower than the costlier de facto standards that would otherwise be imposed by competition. In 2005, Microsoft called for “privacy legislation that would set a uniform standard for the collection, storage and use of personal information” just as its software was starting to lose out to more secure competitors.
As large businesses are shielded from smaller-scale competition, their swelling organizational complexity requires them to both become more opaque to, and demand greater transparency from, individuals. Thus the increasing difficulty of consumers determining, both figuratively and literally, “what’s in the meat” while data about them is collected on larger and larger scales by both big business and government (which, given its own ever-multiplying surveillance scandals, seems a very inappropriate fox to guard this particular hen house).
A healthier populace can only result from a more comprehensive social transformation toward human-scale institutions. This was foreseen by such decentralist, antistate thinkers as Murray Bookchin, who noted in 1952 that “The Problem of Chemicals In Food” was a side effect of an overly-centralized society, and that “[i]t is doubtful if legislation will do anything to arrest this trend;” and Ralph Borsodi, who in the 1920s advocated organic-farming ends via the laissez-faire means of small-scale, local production at lower prices than the rising processed-foods industry. Get corporate dinosaurs off subsidized life support at taxpayer expense, and the full flowering of a free market in data privacy will make it dirt-common.
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Gabriel Kolko’s socialist “scholarship” is fundamentally wrong – as it assumes that the American Federal government in the age of “Teddy” Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson normally acted to benefit capitalist “big business” . T. Roosevelt , Woodrow Wilson (and so on) did NOT normally act to do this.
Private business enterprises (large and small) will seek to take advantage of any new situation. including new regulations (and that includes being better able to bare the costs of regulation that smaller rival enterprises), – but that is a very different thing from the regulations being created to benefit big business. And the level of regulation that now exists massively hurts large (as well as small) business enterprises.
And, of course, economies of scale still exist WITHOUT government regulations or other interventions. Someone who claims that large enterprises would not be the main way of producing goods, and of selling them in retail, (without government intervention) is just wrong. The National Socialists in Germany may have offered the fantasy of a economy dominated up of little farms and corner shops (no evil “Jew” Department Stores), but it remains a fantasy..
The post also pretends that this (the supposed threat of big business) is what the debate over privacy is about – it is not.
The debate over privacy is a debate between the Forth Amendment and the demands of National Security. It is the government (not private business – large or small) that is the primary threat to privacy – as Senator Rand Paul points out (he also points out where Mr Snowden was right – and where Mr Snowden was wrong in his actions).
As for quoting the New York Times (on anything) this is an error. The “NYT” is a dreadful collectivist rag (it supported Stalin in the 1930s, it supported the “Old China Hands” whose advice led to the victory of Mao in China in the 1940s, it supported Castro in the 1950s, and on and on – each new collectivist is going to be “different” and they never are). People should not waste their time on the collectivist New York Times.
Organic food?
Go to Whole Foods (owned by a libertarian) there is no need for government labelling if you want this higher priced food.
General food safety?
Again no need for government regulation – it is not in the interests of a butcher to poison his customers (Adam Smith). See Milton Friedman (the “Who Protects the Consumer?” chapter) “Free To Choose” (1980).
I should point out that by “supported” the collectivists I mean slanted reporting by the New York Times (I know the author of the post is NOT a supporter of the NYT – but the point should still be made).
For example, the NYT reporting denying that the socialists were murdering many millions of human beings in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The reporting supporting the American “advice” that Chang stop the campaign in Manchuria in 1946 (the last chance to defeat the Marxists – and thus save tens of millions of lives, Mao being the largest scale mass murderer in human history), the denials in the NYT in the 1950s that Fidel Castro was a Marxist (he had been one all his adult life), and on and on.