{"id":2124,"date":"2014-03-29T10:40:35","date_gmt":"2014-03-29T18:40:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2124"},"modified":"2014-03-29T10:40:35","modified_gmt":"2014-03-29T18:40:35","slug":"the-foxx-caveat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2124","title":{"rendered":"The Foxx Caveat"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cCalifornia leads the nation every year in automobile deaths. \u00a0We\u2019ve never lost. \u00a0Don\u2019t think you\u2019re going to come in from New York, Pennsylvania, Florida and take our championship. \u00a0We get most of them in the safety zones. ‘Come on, Martha! We\u2019re in the safety zone! \u00a0They have to stop! See those white lines?\u2019 Did you ever see a white line stop a truck? \u00a0Those lines are there so the police have some place to start measuring how far your body was thrown.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Redd Foxx nailed it fifty years ago, though he probably wasn\u2019t thinking about Google and Facebook and the NSA. \u00a0People blow through crosswalks and stop signs and cross against lights all the time. \u00a0Go down to the corner of Castro and Villa in downtown Googleburg on any given weekday at 5 PM and you can watch America\u2019s stupidest intersection at work: cars blowing through red lights and red turn arrows, people walking across the street on a \u201cdon\u2019t walk\u201d just because the light turned green for cars, bicycles trundling down the sidewalk – you name it, and if it\u2019s a traffic violation, somebody\u2019s committing it. \u00a0So much for the law. \u00a0Why? \u00a0Because it\u2019s not that big a deal to people – culturally, there is a sense that abiding by the letter of the law is less urgent than indulging our own convenience.<\/p>\n

By contrast, there\u2019s very little to prevent me going around in public with no shirt on. \u00a0Convenience stores notwithstanding – and God knows \u201cNo Shirt No Shoes No Service\u201d held very little sway in the Jiffy Chek of my childhood memories – I could pretty much walk around downtown Googleburg with no shirt on all damn day and be wholly within the letter of the law. \u00a0But I don\u2019t, and the people of Googleburg are probably happy I don\u2019t, and you know why? \u00a0Because it\u2019s not culturally appropriate. \u00a0Not here, anyway.<\/p>\n

Similarly, last week Microsoft apparently went into its own email service to trail down a leak. And on paper, by the terms of their own service, they were completely within their rights and the letter of the law to do so. Yet the backlash was immediate and huge: how dare Microsoft investigate a leak of their own data by searching the contents of their own mail servers? \u00a0Put it that way and it starts to looks a little ridiculous – but there it is. \u00a0People are outraged, culturally, about something that is technologically and legally 100% legitimate.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the thing about Google and Facebook and the NSA. \u00a0What they do to harvest your data is entirely within the letter of the law, most of the time. \u00a0And when it\u2019s not, it\u2019s too profitable – or just too simple – not to abide by the letter of the law. \u00a0If it takes less effort to scoop up an entire nation\u2019s phone records and search for the target than to single out the target individual\u2019s records, then the law be damned, that\u2019s what the NSA is going to do. \u00a0You can opt out of this or that or delete information from your Facebook profile, but what are the odds that data is actually gone? \u00a0Nil, because I\u2019ve deleted an item from my profile before and seen it crop back up years<\/em> later as a recommended thing to favorite. \u00a0And not something obvious like \u201cJohnny Cash,\u201d I mean a made-up term of our own devising that I listed as an interest as a goof, which had no page associated with it. \u00a0Against the law? \u00a0Even if it is, how do you plan to hold them to it?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why the fix isn\u2019t technological, or even legal. \u00a0The technology is always running ahead of the law, the law can\u2019t shift quickly enough, and the technology finds its own path. \u00a0The only fix is cultural. \u00a0We have to decide as a society that exploiting the ease of modern data-mining for commercial purposes without our control is somehow unacceptable, and act on the belief of that unacceptability. \u00a0We didn\u2019t stop making jokes about women drivers or slandering \u201cChinamen\u201d or dressing up in blackface for frat parties because there was a law against it – we stopped because the culture changed to make those things unacceptable.<\/p>\n

Add that to the list, and call it the Foxx Caveat: don\u2019t rely on the fact of a white line to stop a truck.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cCalifornia leads the nation every year in automobile deaths. \u00a0We\u2019ve never lost. \u00a0Don\u2019t think you\u2019re going to come in from New York, Pennsylvania, Florida and take our championship. \u00a0We get most of them in the safety zones. ‘Come on, Martha! We\u2019re in the safety zone! \u00a0They have to stop! See those white lines?\u2019 Did you … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Foxx Caveat”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2124"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2124\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}