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Budapest W4: Human Rights and Emerging Technologies - Privacy and Technology

Richards, Neil M. (2013) Privacy and Technology: The Dangers of Surveillance. Harvard Law Review, vol. 126, no. 7 (May 2013), 1934–1965.

" First, surveillance is harmful because it can chill the exercise of our civil liberties. With respect to civil liberties, consider surveillance of people when they are thinking, reading, and communicating with others in order to make up their minds about political and social issues. Such intellectual surveillance is especially dangerous because it can cause people not to experiment with new, controversial, or deviant ideas." p.1935

Four principles to guide surveillance law:
"surveillance transcends the public/private divide. Public and private surveillance are simply related parts of the same problem, rather than wholly discrete." p.1935
"secret surveillance is illegitimate and prohibit the creation of any domestic-surveillance programs whose existence is secret." p.1935
"we should recognize that total surveillance is illegitimate and reject the idea that it is acceptable for the government to record all Internet activity without authorization." p.1935-6
"surveillance is harmful. Surveillance menaces intellectual privacy and increases the risk of blackmail, coercion, and discrimination; accordingly, we must recognize surveillance as a harm in constitutional standing doctrine." p.1936

"Four aspects of this definition are noteworthy, as they expand our understanding of what surveillance is and what its purposes are. First, it is focused on learning information about individuals. Second, surveillance is systematic; it is intentional rather than random or arbitrary. Third, surveillance is routine — a part of the ordinary administrative apparatus that characterizes modern societies.10 Fourth, surveillance can have a wide variety of purposes — rarely totalitarian domination, but more typically subtler forms of influence or control." p.1937

"At the broadest level, we are building an Internet that is on its face free to use, but is in reality funded by billions of transactions where advertisements are individually targeted at Internet users based upon detailed profiles of their reading and consumer habits.17 Such “behavioral advertising” is a multibillion-dollar business, and is the foundation on which the successes of companies like Google and Facebook have been built." p.1938

"Big Data surveillance and analysis thus affect the commercial power of consumers, identifying their times of relative weakness and allowing more effective marketing to nudge them in the directions that watchful companies desire." p.1940

" the general principle under which American law operates is that surveillance is legal unless forbidden." p.1942

"surveillance inclines us to the mainstream and the boring. It is a claim that when we are watched while engaging in intellectual activities, broadly defined — thinking, reading, websurfing, or private communication — we are deterred from engaging in thoughts or deeds that others might find deviant. Surveillance thus menaces our society’s foundational commitments to intellectual diversity and eccentric individuality." p.1948

"More recent scholars have explored the risks that surveillance poses to democratic self-governance.81 One such risk is that of self-censorship, in terms of speech, action, or even belief."p.1949

"If we care about the development of eccentric individuality and freedom of thought as First Amendment values, then we should be especially wary of surveillance of activities through which those aspects of the self are constructed." p.1950

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