this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024
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privacy
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It's unfortunate that SSN has come to be used as a form of proof of existence as a person, but I'm glad at least that more effective means of formally tracking and quantifying us have been successfully fought back. Banks, governments, service providers and employers having some friction and uncertainty in whether their database entry accurately corresponds to you is itself a valuable form of privacy.
I've been reading the book Seeing Like A State and I think it has some pretty good points about how civic legibility and record keeping is established as a tool of centralized control and can be a dangerous double edged sword.
Any tool that is misused can be harmful, that doesn't mean you shouldn't use it. It just means you should regulate how it's used.
The tool is not the problem, the user is.
Well, partly. For instance you might be able to approach the problem of gun violence with a culture of responsible gun use. But it could also reduce violence if you got rid of the guns. The problem happens when multiple conditions are satisfied; both that the tool is available and that people are going to misuse it.
To quote an excerpt from the book I mentioned:
The other elements being "high-modernist ideology", an authoritarian state, and "a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans".
The problem is that, like with the guns example, "regulating how it's used" and avoiding all that stuff is a really precarious and difficult problem, and failure seems very likely, especially given the state of the US right now. For dangerous tools like effective identification schemes, I think favoring the added safety of resisting them is a legitimate choice when you can't really trust the people who would be able to use them.