Re: A few notes
Huh. I will take responsibility for my poor explanation I suppose.
You appear to believe that access to information to data is a zero-sum game of sorts. It is not. You also seem to think it is OK to participate in the 'artificial scarcity economy' as long as you are one of the winners and not one of the losers. You also place more than a little trust in officialdom and the 'party line'.
We fundamentally disagree with respect to the above and it is a disagreement unlikely to be resolved.
Data is valuable. Data about me is worth money. It is bought and sold all the time. A clever geek can do a statistical analysis with data from data mining operations. If there exists a correlation between increased mortality and some data element related to me, that is worth money to an insurance company. They will prosper by selling insurance to me at a higher rate or save money by not selling a bad police. This is good for the miner and good for the insurance company, but it is bad for me. It is my data and any value it has properly resides with me.
A fiduciary that acts exclusively on my behalf can see to it that only the barest information necessary goes from me through them to a third party. A large well funded agent working for me will be able to negotiate better terms than I could on my own. To the extent that they create value, we will share it. For the agent, it will be a profitable business.
Privacy is a security issue. To the extent that banks are attempting to use my data beyond the purpose that put it into their hands, the banks are an attacker. I work with financial institutions and I can assure you that they look to profit from any data they can gather and they do *not* expunge anything unless forced to do so.
To the extent that a single bank might cheat or even accidentally lose custody of my data, they present a finite risk. To the extent that that the number of banks who have my data increases, so does my risk.
My agent has a legal duty to act as a fiduciary, because by definition that is our relationship. In Canada, at least, the banks have fought very hard so they do not legal have legal obligations as fiduciaries. They are under no legal obligation to give you fair and sound advice about their products or your financial planning. If they give advice that improperly enriches them at your expense, it is fair game. I know this for a fact because I have been in that position personally and I was astonished to find it was true when I went to recover my money.
Currently, financial institutions skirt the Criminal Code. If they were allowed to do worse, they would.
Re: Someone needs your name.
Sure, my friends and my family need to call me something. I like having a name. It's tradition! However, a telemarketer only needs my name for his benefit and his benefit comes at a cost to me. I don't want him to have it. The bank does not need a name to transfer money, they need an account. I don't type my name into an ATM machine to withdraw cash. It does not need it. Nowhere, in the software systems I have seen (I have worked with a lot of large financial institutions) is there a routine that requires particular ASCII characters in a name to manipulate accounts.
Re: If it is their the data protection watchdog should give them a kicking.
What should be and what is are not the same thing. In practice, our watchdogs serve them, not us.
Re: does not mean innocent people should have facebook taken away from them
Was not talking about taking facebook away. Was talking about making employer access to it impossible. The simple way would be to broadly make such requests a criminal offense.
Re: old weapon export laws but isn't enforced.
Yea, we have a lot of that going around. It is not OK. Making everyone a 'virtual criminal' allowing selective enforcement is even worse than enforcing the law.
Re: But only on a court order, which one would hope was carefully considered.
I trust the courts more than I do the executive and the legislature, but I do not entirely trust them and do not want to be forced to trust them when it is not necessary.
It may be OK for you trust your security to wishing and hoping. It is not OK for me. Better to make this simply impossible to make sure cheating can't happen. We currently have less to fear from criminals than we do from the State and powerful Corporations. They currently take, by force, under color of 'law', almost everything you earn. Criminals might rip you off for a few percent of your income.
Possible without my permission = too easy.
Re: If your sole income came from being a creator ...
It does. Removing copyrights would have little to no impact on that income and incalculable benefits otherwise. I am paid to create software that people use to automate things they are already doing to create things of value. The one thing that I wrote that is in wide use is open source library code that was funded by government research grants. Everybody wins there. I know lots of creative people and they generally make their bread and butter with an honest days work that the community will continue to fund. This is like arguing that we should not automate stuff because it will put people out of their menial labor jobs. It is a false choice to say that people must either slave away their lives at menial jobs or go hungry. They can (a) move to jobs automating things like me and (b) work less because the automation reduces the labor necessary to produce a given output.
Re: Unless you are referring to a utopian vision where physical goods are free then this isn't going to fly.
The world can be a better place, of that I am sure. Mining and manufacturing to produce goods do not require Copyrights and Patents. Farming not only does not need them, it is negatively impacted by them. Eliminating patents on genes would mean more food and medicine, not less.
Re: Are you seriously suggesting that anyone with manufacturing capability should be able to grab their designs and start selling?
Yep. Aggregate wealth increases when information is free to move and everyone is free to use the best techniques available.
Re: is a fine goal.
Not so sure that creating a lottery race to patent human genes has any value. To the extent that goals are fine, Copyrights and Patents hinder rather than help. You would be appalled if you started to seriously drill into the patent system.
Re: a dig at the open source believe that ... many eyeballs makes for safe code.
Nobody in the know seriously disputes this. Entirely secret security systems cannot be trusted at all.
Re: fiduciary and that takes trust
Trust but verify and only trust what you must. I do not trust a sole fiduciary either. Anything important is always secured by multiple custody. As single combination won't open a bank vault. You have to trust the two parties holding the combinations together, but you do not have to trust each of them separately. In modern encryption systems we can spread custody to an arbitrary 'm' of 'n' custodians such that, for instance, it takes the cooperation of 7 out of 10 key holders to open the vault.
When I say you can't trust me, I am standing as proxy for any party providing encryption.
Re: encryption skills and untrustworthy compilers
I can definitely produce code to encrypt on 1Mbit keys, do 'm' of 'n', PKI, etc. I use a compiler for which I am able to compile the source in most cases. If you have access to the source, you can (albeit with some difficulty) defend against various compiler attack strategies. You do need a certain level of skill, but it is not *that* difficult to get as good as you can off the shelf with the added trust that you compiled the code yourself. The back-doors I worry about are deliberate cryptographic weaknesses in key schedules, key sizes, randomizers and similar design characteristics. There are ways, definitely, for a careful journeyman programmer to improve on out of the box pre-compiled code.