On 2014-08-22 at 01:16, Robert J. Hansen wrote: > On 8/21/2014 3:35 PM, Johannes Zarl wrote: >> "Compiling a collection of publicly available information" is an >> almost perfect description of the term "surveillance". E.g. a >> surveillance camera does exactly that: it collects publicly available >> information. > > So does the phone book, Wikipedia, and IMDB. We don't call them > surveillance.
The difference in the relation we have with information is who does it concern: when it concerns everybody (like Science, information about politics, events, Philosophy, Art, etc. what generally is what Wikipedia contains, aka “encyclopedic informations”), it should be shared among everyone, and not doing so is taking part in some kind of oppression (like stopping people from sharing a software); when it concerns only some people (like private information, one-to-one communication, etc.) it should be keep secret amoung the few people it concerns, otherwise it is also taking part in some kind of oppression (like surveilling, spying, controlling). That’s why we ask for more transparency from the powerfull and more privacy to the weak. When someone watch the tweets of some friends of some person discussing with some others, while not knowing and not being interested of it, even if it doesn’t concerns her, just to spy the person, it *is* surveillance. Though Twitter haven’t sophisticated privacy features like circles or groups, so it’s possible even if it’s not always a good thing. The same applies to IP. In this case, it does concern only the person owning the house what color is it, what is the model of door, of lock, of key and how to open it. So even if it’s “publicly available information” (like in Twitter, Facebook, or any potentially privacy-harmful social network) it shouldn’t be collected without hurting someone’s freedom, so here the usefulness of the GNU patch for it :) _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
