I'm reading Max Hillebrand's Praxeology of Privacy (#1489281) and would very much enjoy the Stackers' opinions about the things inside. Your commentary is welcome even if you don't have time to read the book. You can find Part I here - #1501602 and Part II here - #1507762
Part III: Economic FoundationsPart III: Economic Foundations
I have to say that this part was also somewhat disappointing. While I realize the importance of laying out the theoretical foundation of a topic, this very much felt like a list of definitions with a little extra added here and there -- I can find a list on wikipedia.. Hillebrand could have done better with weaving this into an argument or story.
The first chapter (Chapter 6: Information, Scarcity, and Property) was the most interesting to me. Hillebrand makes a reasonable case that information is not property and then attempts to create a concept of privacy that is consistent with such a view.
Whether companies that collect data about users commit privacy violation depends on the terms. If users agree to data collection (however unwisely) in exchange for services, no violation occurs: it is voluntary exchange. The exchange may be foolish, the terms may be buried in dense agreements, but consent was given. If companies collect data without consent or through deception that exceeds the scope of agreements, this may violate contract or involve fraud.
But the data collected, once in the company’s possession, is stored on their media. They own their servers. The information patterns on those servers are not “your property” that you can reclaim. The remedy for excessive data collection is not property claims but better contracts and privacy-preserving competition.
At first, I felt myself resisting this argument. Surely, there should be some sort of property right to which we can appeal in the defense of things like what we view online or where we go while carrying our phones or what purchases we make. However, it is fairly obvious that a third party's observations of my movements are not ownable by me (any more than it is reasonable for me to compel people to avert their eyes from me -- looking at you government "top secret" clearance business).
But when do we do when technology arrives that increases the likelihood that we are tracked and information about us is assembled in databases that are cross correlated?
Technology changes what is possible, not what is legitimate.
Hillebrand's answer is to marshal your defenses and wield tools that effectively block such surveillance. People must defend the information they would like to keep private rather than expect a government to do it for them.
Given this framework, privacy violation is not someone knowing information you wish they did not know; that may be unfortunate but is not a violation. In the standard case, privacy violation means someone accessing information through aggression against person or property.
The spirit is strong, but, unfortunately, the flesh is weak. I like thinking about privacy this way, but the problem is that it is darn hard to defend my privacy. The internet is not designed to make it easy and small slip ups can have catastrophic consequences. I feel that Hillebrand should have spent much more time on this chapter (perhaps he will address the issue in later chapters). But something is clearly inadequate: the tools or the legal structure. For me to seriously hold this attitude of the privacy I have is the privacy I can defend, I will have to become some kind of freak who barely uses the internet, carry my devices in faraday cages, and eschew most modern conveniences.
We'll see if Hillebrand gives me a better path in the parts to come.
The footnotes continue to be a highlight of the book. Here are the new veins I found in this part:
- Roderick T. Long, “Owning Ideas Means Owning People”
- The Problem with Intellectual Property (Papinian Press Working Paper No. 2, 2025)
- Laura Davidson and Walter Block, “Bitcoin, the Regression Theorem, and the Emergence of a New Medium of Exchange,” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 18, no. 3 (2015): 311–338.
- Sarah Meiklejohn et al., “A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments
- Among Men with No Names,” Proceedings of the 2013 Internet Measurement Conference (ACM, 2013)
- Perry Mehrling, The New Lombard Street: How the Fed Became the Dealer of Last Resort (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011)
This is the only defensible treatment of property that I can imagine. "Inadequate" implies there ought to be a better way to preserve privacy but that is hardly a given.
Going much beyond "keep it to yourself", will involve imposing obligations on other people and their property. As you say, it's not reasonable to put yourself where people can see you and get upset by what they see.
A friend of mine once commented that privacy is relatively new and not particularly natural. When our ancestors lived in tiny communities, basically everyone knew all of your business. I'm not convinced privacy is a particularly realistic expectation.
Let's think about it with respect to money though: in a system such as Bitcoin, where each utxo is uniquely identified and the ledger is public, privacy seems necessary, even if it is unrealistic. If we are unable to keep our identity separate from our utxos, is Bitcoin viable?
People have always been able to keep some secrets. It's not that we can have no privacy, just not the kind of broad privacy that people have come to expect.
The problem is that electronic records and the copious quantities in which we are creating them lead to a sort of all or nothing kind of situation. I agree that it may be unreasonable to expect my google searches to remain private (although I suspect many people might disagree), but I'm not confident any meaningful privacy is possible in the face of all the records that get created with almost every moment of my life. A little bit of correlation and all of a sudden I am a completely open book.
Do you expect your waking and sleeping schedule to be private?
I would love for it to be. but I don't see how I can achieve something like that given all the angles by which someone might determine it.
And these are just the angles I can think of. I'm sure I'm missing quite a few.
I expect it to be private in the sense that I want it to be and I don't like that other people know it, but since I do very little to control the loss of this information, I don't see how my expectation is reasonable.
Yeah exactly (and you're making part of my point for me.)
One of the nym-preservation things I taught myself to do is to mix up work/wake times among nyms, and sometimes multitask (as treacherous as that is on its own!) across different electronic identities using multiple (and unlinked) devices... it's hard at times. It's also probably not worth it for most. I refuse to sleep at times other than when I am sleepy though, so there can still be patterns.
The correlation points start at your modem hardware - be it a phone or a fibre router and from there on propagates. I do like that we have randomized hardware identities for wifi connectivity now though. That's a win. But overall, from a time & place perspective (with or without your actual name attached to it) I think that the chance that anyone can truly evade this while using non-burner phones and laptops, is minimal.
If privacy is a sort of anarchy where only the (technically) strong preserve their privacy, what good is the theory and stuff in max's book? It seems I should be reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to Anonymity not Praxeology of Privacy.
I don't disagree with the assessment of the situation.
I don't agree that there must be a way to have our cake and eat it too. Being linked to the entire world electronically has immense benefits and it makes us highly visible in ways we haven't really come to terms with yet.