Libertarians and Privacy
by Mike Kimel
Libertarians and Privacy
Over at EconLog, David Henderson berates a fellow libertarian on the difference between Facebook at the Census.
But let’s grant, for the sake of this discussion, that FB is quite contemptuous of privacy and that the Census Bureau is less so. Here’s the difference.
Every single person who signs up with Facebook does so voluntarily. If FB had committed to guarding your privacy, then it would be breeching a contract by doing so. But I’ve never seen FB make that commitment. The U.S. Census Bureau, by contrast, uses the threat of force to get its information. That’s a pretty big difference. It’s not one that I would expect, say, theNew York Times , to point out. But it is a distinction that I would have expected from someone who calls himself a bleeding heartlibertarian .
A lot of libertarians seem to think there’s a distinction between when the government engages in an activity and when a private sector entity engages in the same activity. But a thought experiment is in order. Consider… it isn’t technologically infeasible for me, much less an organization with a lot more resources than I have, to do any of the following things from public property – say, across the street from David Henderson’s home:
1. Monitor every conversation that occurs in a home and parse each of those conversations for information
2. Monitor comings and goings into and out of a home
3. Monitor internet usage, and potentially, phone calls made and received in the home
4. Monitor where each individual is in the home at any given moment and to some extent, what that individual is doing.
5. Monitor precisely how much electricity is going into the home (and no, this does not require access to or a view of the meter or any contact in the electric company).
6. Monitor where every individual who lives in the home goes when they are not in the home
Essentially, all it takes to do all of these things is time, a bit of determination, and maybe $5,000 in equipment. I don’t even think any of these these activities is illegal if done by a private party, except to some extent, number 3, and, in some states, number 1 if the monitor makes a recording of the conversations. (And realistically, guys like David Henderson don’t exactly like the government limiting what private citizens can and cannot do, do they?) Number 4 depends in part on weather conditions.
Additionally, the costs of monitoring is just coming down. It won’t be long before one could surreptitiously keep track of a lot of aspects of a person’s health remotely, and without their consent.
Now, an organization doing all of the above does not require the consent or even the knowledge of the monitored to do the monitoring, unless one assumes that failure to deploy expensive countermeasures is equivalent to consent. Note that for the monitoring to occur, there is no need whatsoever for the monitored party to have any relationship at all with the monitor, and threats of violence are completely unnecessary.
The only thing going on is the collection of information which Mr. Henderson feels would have been a bad thing it been done by the government. It will be interesting to see where libertarians of Mr. Henderson’s ilk go in the coming years. Will they fall on the side of “a private party’s information is private unless he/she has chosen to share that information with third parties, whether explicitly or implicitly through transactions” or will they laud the collection of said information as a triumph of the free market? My guess is the latter, simply because the former would require government intervention, and the government is always evil as far as some folks are concerned.
Meanwhile, collectively, the rest of us will try to steer a sensible middle ground – determining what is permissible and what is “too far” and setting limits through legislation.
This post brings up some important points, and touches upon areas where there’s often confusion over the libertarian position. Here’s some additional nuance from an anarcho-capitalist (AC) libertarian perspective:
– Most ACs believe privacy is not a right. In this perspective, privacy rights, like intellectual property rights, are really boundary invasions of the person or property of those “obligated” to “respect” such “rights.” Note there are important distinctions to be made here, e.g., wiretapping is considered a libertarian crime, but because of property trespass rather than any privacy issues. A paper from noted ACs Block, Whitehead and Kinsella (http://www.walterblock.com/wp-content/uploads/publications/block-etal_spam_whittier-2006.pdf) delves into this more deeply. Importantly, claiming here that privacy is not a right is not the same as encouraging a disregard for privacy considerations, just as advocating an end to the War on Drugs is not strictly equivalent to encouraging drug use. At question is the proper use of force in society and the implications of prevailing standards regarding such force.
– ACs believe it requires empirical blinders to try and “steer a sensible middle ground” by “determining what is permissible and what is ‘too far’ and setting limits through legislation” regarding the relatively omnipotent state collecting and manipulating information on its citizens. White belt-level Google-fu can find countless examples of state agents overstepping legal bounds, and those are only the examples of which we hear.
– Keeping personal information private decidedly doesn’t fundamentally require state intervention. If one believes oneself a juicy target for data collection against one’s wishes, it’s entirely possible, and reasonable, to set up countermeasures through the voluntary purchase of products and services. This is, of course, not fool-proof, but it’s much more coherent than an expectation of protection from the state, which is the very entity most incentivized to collect information on individuals. Clearly, for every one private, lone stalker in a van there are dozens of state agents monitoring the comings and goings of individuals. Now, regarding corporate abusers of trust,…
– …discussions involving distinctions between private service providers and the state have become increasingly tricky. Cronyism on the part of the state has made contrasts vague, sometimes non-existent. One key difference that usually remains, though, is that one can still generally opt-out of private services. This fact tends to improve service over the long-term, as contrasted with force-backed monopolies, ceteris paribus. A private company/organization which disregards the expressed wishes of its clients often and deeply enough will go out of business, unless the state backs it.
Basically, libertarianism is feudalism in which each serf is voluntarily enfeoffed to a lord, usually because he or she wants to eat, have a place to live and so on. In theory, a serf could avoid such commitments, but then they have to find some place to live, something to eat and so on.
If you look at Western Europe between the collapse of the Roman Empire with its powerful central government, you can study the rise of the private sector. Starting the 8th century, private individuals increasingly made voluntary deals with local private enterprises as they took over functions of the government. By the 11th century, feudalism was in flower, everyone was enfeoffed to some CEO or another, and we all know what a wonderful time that was.
(Of course, if you were a woman, you were never given a choice, but that is another issue altogether.)
We dig up skeletons from time to time. Skelotons are taller and heavier during feudalism than during the earlier Roman empire period and during the later centralised state system after the gunpowder revolution.