Assume Surveillance

h/t Popehat for this howler from the Baltimore P-E. It's remarkable in that the author invites libertarians to join him in rejecting the institutions of private property, but the germ of the offer is privacy. Libertarians are worried about governments collecting private information, so they should also be worried about corporations collecting information.

I think this is [sort of] true. I am not a libertarian, so I won't speak on libertarians' behalf, but I retain some concern that the same large, amorphous organization that claims the legitimate authority to imprison, fine, or execute me also gathers voluminous personal data about me. And at first glance, businesses that do much the same thing with the end of offering me exchange opportunities is not just unobjectionable, but welcome. When I read passages like this:

Every moment, torrents of your personal data are pouring into corporate databases. This information is used to refine your credit rating, adjust prices for goods and services, brief potential employers, tailor dating opportunities, define your reputation, determine insurance rates, inform your medical treatment – in short, to influence nearly every aspect of your day-to-day life. And it’s all in private hands, unaccountable to democratic oversight and control, and almost always used to make someone else wealthier with no regard for your own interests.

I beam. People who don't know me are working tirelessly to make it easier for me to find goods and services that will improve my life? They're helping me find love? They're providing more accurate information to lenders so that I no longer have to directly subsidize the imprudent? And all they ask in return is a mere sliver of what these same services would have cost me even as recently as twenty years ago? That, my dear friends, is what I call a screaming deal.

That's awfully romantic, isn't it? That's why I don't believe it for a minute. While I do think that retailers collect data for entirely business-related purposes, it is the height of absurdity to think that Pooh Bear would ignore a delicious pot of hunny, even if it's in Rabbit's Howse.

I am still a Humean at heart. I assume that the sovereign seeks dominion where he can find it. I assume that constituents' scarce attention implies that for most people, the time and trouble it would take to properly research the extent of state surveillance exceeds the marginal benefit they'd enjoy from knowing. Because of this, I don't see an easy way to constrain the state from plundering data troves, either openly or surreptitiously. Ideally, folks would have a tidy set of received heuristics the way we have for kicking the tires on horses or looking gift cars in the mouth. Expecting politicians to constrain leviathan is very much petitioning the fox to guard the henhouse. Asking merchants to police themselves ignores the logic of competition. It's a caveat civis world. Understand that anything you do that enters a computer system (which is pretty much anything) is subject to surveillance. Assume your BATNA accordingly.

The Mother and Daughter Test

Sumner on Ozimek. The low-down: both gents agree that there's something deeply wrong with the standard paternalistic trope of "would you [want|let] your daughter do x, where x is an element of the set of morally unsavory activities that don't tend to inflict harm on others (unless, as both Scott and Adam note, the practice is illegal and therefore out of the reach of ordinary recourse against abuses).

So far as their arguments go, I agree wholeheartedly. Where I disagree is in the penumbra. You want to take away the daughter test, but what would you replace it with?

It's far too easy to cavalierly dismiss heuristics as the tools of a lazy mind. But the truth unsavory to the academic sensibilities is that they typical citizen relies heavily on little mental shortcuts because critical analysis is extremely demanding. Even the brightest minds in the academy, specialists who've spent their whole adult lives thinking about thorny social problems, regularly and routinely disagree, and occasionally, get it dead wrong. Ordinary constituents, particularly since they are confronted with the logic of elections, have every incentive to outsource their critical thinking faculties to the specialists, and what better specialist than the Wisdom of the Ages? Heuristics are a labor-saving device.

So if you wish to cast aside a heuristic, it makes little sense to urge folks to switch to a rigorous economic way of thinking in its stead. Why not offer a replacement heuristic? One, if luck might have it, is also time-honored and widely applicable. I refer, of course, to Plato's Divine Maxim.

Call it the mother-and-daughter test.

For private issues of morality, it's fine and good to ask yourself if you want your daughter to do x, where x is something naughty. Use that judgement to guide your private, personal associations if you wish. But for public issues, issues where you'd be willing to employ the truncheon of the state, ask if you'd let your mother do x—whether you'd fine or imprison dear ol' mom for doing whatever.

Yes, this is a nation (and ideally, a world) of free people, but to get folks to settle on that (unfortunately, increasingly rare) bit of moral intuition, the cheap approach is to swap out one small mental shortcut for another. Invert the implied relationship between sovereign and citizen. Ride the unicorn; don't let it ride you.