A year ago, Walled Culture wrote about an extremely important case that was being considered by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU’s top court. The central question was wheth…
The inherent flaw is thinking that “privacy” is something that the courts are capable of providing. They aren’t. The most that government/courts could possibly do is make it illegal to generally and indiscriminately retain IP address records. But that only protects you from law-abiding privacy invaders; it does nothing to protect you from criminals who would use that information nefariously.
When you take adequate and appropriate steps to secure your privacy, it doesn’t actually matter what the courts have to say about “privacy”.
I think that take is short sighted. Because the next obvious step to “no right to online anonymity” is “online anonymity is illegal”, and it’s pretty obvious we’re headed that way. In that case, courts can make it pretty fucking hard to protect your right to privacy.
The scenario you describe actually demonstrates my point. Where anonymity is “illegal”, the only entity you can trust to protect your privacy is you.
That fact does not change when anonymity is “legal”. That fact does not change even when anonymity is mandated. Even if it is a criminal act for me to make a record of who is accessing my service, that is only a legal restriction. It is not a technical restriction. You can’t know whether I am abiding by such a law at the time you are accessing my service. A law mandating anonymity doesn’t actually protect your anonymity; it just gives you the illusion that your anonymity is being protected.
The relevant difference between your scenario and reality is that in your scenario, nobody is blatantly lying about whether your privacy is under attack: it most certainly is.
The inherent flaw is thinking that “privacy” is something that the courts are capable of providing. They aren’t. The most that government/courts could possibly do is make it illegal to generally and indiscriminately retain IP address records. But that only protects you from law-abiding privacy invaders; it does nothing to protect you from criminals who would use that information nefariously.
When you take adequate and appropriate steps to secure your privacy, it doesn’t actually matter what the courts have to say about “privacy”.
I think that take is short sighted. Because the next obvious step to “no right to online anonymity” is “online anonymity is illegal”, and it’s pretty obvious we’re headed that way. In that case, courts can make it pretty fucking hard to protect your right to privacy.
The scenario you describe actually demonstrates my point. Where anonymity is “illegal”, the only entity you can trust to protect your privacy is you.
That fact does not change when anonymity is “legal”. That fact does not change even when anonymity is mandated. Even if it is a criminal act for me to make a record of who is accessing my service, that is only a legal restriction. It is not a technical restriction. You can’t know whether I am abiding by such a law at the time you are accessing my service. A law mandating anonymity doesn’t actually protect your anonymity; it just gives you the illusion that your anonymity is being protected.
The relevant difference between your scenario and reality is that in your scenario, nobody is blatantly lying about whether your privacy is under attack: it most certainly is.