Don’t help ACTA squash your rights
As often is the case when government either can’t control, or can’t understand something, the current drafting of ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is more about ensuring citizens have no right to privacy, than it is about addressing counterfeiting in any significant way.
Unchallenged, this could spell trouble for the movement to data portability and open technology in our ever-expanding information age. Of course, how would you really know what’s being proposed? The negotiations have happened in complete secrecy, with virtually no public consultation, yet the rumour mill is indicating that this agreement could come in with a whole host of significant measures, including search and seizure, mandatory cross-border disclosure and intermediary liability.
In other words should you end up under some cloud of suspicion, you have no right to your own information, no right to your own digital equipment and anyone along the line could be culpable. What does all this mean? Since these measures would presumably be defined by a document with no public scrutiny or consultation, defining the criteria is equally as nebulous. Is your ISP guilty for your illegal download? Who knows?
While it is ostensibly an international treaty, can there be any doubt its major driver would be the US? After all, this kind of knee-jerk stripping of personal liberties is not far off what the Patriot Act did under the guise of the war on terror.
Part of living in a free, democratic society is that some people will do the wrong things sometimes. We, hopefully, draft laws that protect the greater good AND individual liberties and define those wrong things via that mechanism. One key tenet of this whole notion is that one’s suspicion of guilt will, both, pass a considerable litmus test and that this suspicion is just that - suspicion.
Are we unwittingly aiding an erosion of privacy?
And, while our personal freedoms risk becoming more restricted, people are becoming ever more open in their approach to sharing their information. Why else would Google gear up to launch a suite of applications allowing any site to become a Facebook knockoff. Seems to me that’s creating the potential for a real problem in the not-too-distant future. For example, if we continually expose more of ourselves through social media tools and there are fewer protections of our rights, that information becomes very easy for the powers-that-be to get a hold of.
Personally, if I was an American I’d be very leary of using Google Health. This is not because the idea of managing my medical information through a stable, centralized online application is without merit. Rather, that another piece of my very personal life is exposed. As soon as, for example, I have a centralized commercial account that’s importing prescription and health condition information from, say, Walgreen’s, suddenly this stuff is in the hands of for-profit businesses and vulnerable to uses I may not be comfortable with.
Now, I realize that Americans are used to having their health information in the hands of commercial businesses, but it’s very much a foreign concept to me and one that I’d staunchly oppose. It’s not drawing too long a bow in my mind to combine this issue with over-zealous IP treaty privacy policing to effectively lose complete control of my personal life. Is there anything more core to one’s being than that of health?
What about extending that to health coverage by HMOs? Since one of their mandates is to keep claims low, does exposing your health information, however minimally, risk a claim being disallowed? The US health industry has done a great job of buying votes to keep the US healthcare system private. Is it even just possible that the collusion therein presents a problem with your personal data getting into government, and then, commercial healthcare’s hands?
While an entity like Google is not a social network, are the EU’s concerns still applicable? While your data seems to be more secure with Google, is the wider the net they cast for data partnerships placing your personal information at higher risk?
I certainly wouldn’t have a clue, but I don’t think I’ll risk my health to find out.