While today’s Essential Report poll shows voters support the idea of restricting the rights of “some” to ensure the security of the rest of the community, when the focus shifts to their own rights, they become a lot more concerned about state overreach.
Essential found that 71% of Australian social media users (who make up around three-quarters of the population) are concerned about surveillance and privacy online, including 28% who professed themselves “very concerned”. Fifty-five per cent of social media users had increased their security settings; 49% had changed the type of things they were posting online, and 41% had removed information about themselves.
They are wise to do so — there are plenty of threats to our privacy online: the corporations that provide the social media platforms, the advertisers that want to sell us things, the criminals who want our personal data and the governments that want to monitor what we’re doing and saying. The copyright industry even wants to turn our ISPs into their own private police force under the excuse of preventing file sharing.
Whether or not the government is successful in securing passage of its mass surveillance measure later in the year (for data retention is mass surveillance), we hope one positive of the debate will be a significant rise in the number of Australians taking measures to secure their privacy online as much as conveniently possible.
Forget “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide” — Australians don’t need to justify their right to privacy to anyone, and you’re a mug if you think you can trust our government or corporations with your data.
Quote: “voters support the idea of restricting the rights of “some” to ensure the security of the rest of the community, when the focus shifts to their own rights, they become a lot more concerned about state overreach.”
A serial killer has their rights restricted quite substantially while they are in gaol, which does protect the rights of their potential victims. I am not a threat to the rights or lives of other people, so I should not be in gaol.
If, on the other hand, the definition of “some” is based generally on race or religion, then, no, people should not be losing their rights unless they pose a very real threat to society.
Bernard Keane’s analysis of the poll that you have linked to above, says “there should be more restrictions on rights and freedom for some people” (unspecified, but you know who)“. I would suggest that if “some” was not specified, then I would not know who if I took the poll, as, for me, there are two correct answers depending on how I interpret “some people”. Perhaps I fail to understand polling techniques, but leaving “some people” undefined seems to make the poll question too ambiguous to be meaningful in any way. Depending on whether questions about “allegations of terrorism” were asked before or after that question, may skew the interpretation of the question about “restrictions on rights and freedom for some people” even moreso.
And now we’re facing the prospect of very personal information – health information – being handed over to the private sector, without any say in the matter.
Three quarters of the population uses social media? Seriously?
No wonder this country is in deep doo-doo.