PrivacyRights.org & cyber privateers on same team?

A statement yesterday about the realities of privacy deserves some logical parsing:

"…We believe that people have a right to know what information is being collected about them and control over how that information is being shared," said Amber Yoo, director of communications at Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

Does your religious system allow for the possibility of some kind of Judgement Day? A day where all men's evil acts will be shown on some kind of cosmic big screen for all to see? Forget for a moment the practicalities, like how long such a show might take. Perhaps in the next life our comprehension will be so supercharged that we will be able to simultaneously (ie; multi-thread) billions of such…revealing…exhibits of humankind's depravity.

Well, guess what? Judgement Day is here. Not only do social sites like FaceBook and LinkedIn pretty well bare voluntary admissions, and not only is self-destructive behavior likely to put your Weiner in a sling, but pattern-based analytics can pretty well pound those last nails in humanity's privacy coffin.

A new morality might be in order. I call it The Grandma Rule. Simply put, you shouldn't do anything in your public or private life that you wouldn't do with your grandmother's knowledge. Naturally, she wouldn't be standing right there on your honeymoon night, but she'd certainly have been to the wedding and have a pretty good idea you might be starting a family one of these nights really really soon.

Similarly, pattern-based analytics wouldn't necessarily have a video camera in your bedroom (unless you were recording the activity over a "hacked" Internet device), but most of those clinical details would be "grokkable" to a mathematician with sufficiently advanced analytic tools and access to a sufficiently large pile of Big Data.

This new reality is so axiomatic that it should make legalization of cyber privateering one of the main goals of PrivacyRights.org. Again, from "data exhaust" available to me, I predict a public demonstration of this reality will soon make headlines. After which it might be a lot easier to get the U.S. Congress to seriously consider legalizing (ie; monetizing) cyber privateering. Again, violations of privacy could fall under the domain of you-invade-my-privacy-then-I'll-loot-you-in-a-profoundly-disproportionate-response economics dictated by my Cyber Privateering Code of conduct.

This proposal might well have the same general effect on privacyrights.org as would a full moon on a werewolf. Then again, privacy makes for some, uh,  strange bedfellows.