It’s campaign season! An idea: Do we really have to take privacy precautions in order for comms intended to be private, to be private?

 July 13, 2022

But it’s also “campaign season!” So the proposal - shouldn’t we go beyond privacy rights toward positive personal data ownership? Don’t you have copyright by default over anything created out of your words? “Platform” - contained information is no different than information created on a black template like a piece of paper. If you wrote a diary on a booklet, say, that had a form or template printed on it, you should have theoretical copy rights over the content of that diary, even if you may not have copy rights over the template (blank/unfilled) itself. The fact that platforms structure your content shouldn’t remove your copy rights to the unformatted content. Platforms, i.e., might own copy rights to the style sheet but not to the content. That is like they could own the CSS but not the HTML. Copy right procedures do like you to take initiative to copyright particular works - but that doesn’t preclude retroactive copy right or a case for ownership in certain extraordinary cases: and the amount of data on some social media or blog rolls may qualify as those extraordinary cases: and the amount of data on some social media or blog rolls may qualify as those extraordinary cases. (There is a distinction between digital privacy from unwarranted police action, and privacy rights against data mining for advertising purposes, too.) Copyright would base for collective action against advertising’s data mining practices - which also includes political research i.e. Cambridge Analytica etc. Protection from unwarranted police action would have to be fought out over private files and communications - we can’t expect the police forces to abstain from OSINT. However, we should take a stand that we should have a reasonable expectation of privacy in a legal setting whenever information is not explicitly posted for the public, even if we haven’t taken “all reasonable precautions” to encrypt and so on. Unencrypted messaging apps should be categorized, for purposes of whether we can expect privacy in a legal setting, as private communications, just as high-level encrypted messaging apps. There should be no legal expectation to protect your privacy in order to have those comms be categorized as private.