Law in the Internet Society

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YuShiFirstPaper 3 - 25 Jan 2010 - Main.EbenMoglen
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Apathy, Vigilance, and an Amorphous Fear

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 While a sizeable portion of my peers do take a reasonable amount of precaution to secure their online information, the number of people who fall into the two groups described above is too significant to ignore. It is my contention that there is such an incoherence of response to online privacy concerns within a similarly-educated group because people do not truly have a precise understanding of what the threat is. The danger is not as tangible as that of writing one’s name and social security number on a sheet of paper and taping it to a lamp post, and it is certainly not as real as a thief breaking into one’s house and taking confidential files. Instead, for most of us we learn of online privacy dangers through warnings from the media and anecdotes from friends. This creates an almost mythical kind of fear, an amorphous fear that is always lurking, but one that can be dismissed as easily as it can be sensationalized. As a result, like the myriads of ways in which children react to ghost stories, people respond to the online privacy threat in ways that reflect their “gut feeling” rather than any reasoned process of thought.
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You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" on the next line:

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I think this essay is peculiarly modest. You don't have much trouble seeming right given the straw men against which you contend. And the only insight you derive from the tour on which you go is that we should expect people to respond vaguely to threats that aren't made personally tangible. Yet people seem to have acquired an awful lot of paper shredders in the last decade. And even if your social psychology is correct it is not very surprising. Maybe in revision you could give the essay a more ambitious goal.
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Revision 3r3 - 25 Jan 2010 - 02:11:06 - EbenMoglen
Revision 2r2 - 17 Nov 2009 - 04:31:06 - YuShi
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