I’m increasingly encountering situations where people are forced to go through various kinds of technical hoops in order to exercise their legal rights.
Five examples:
① You have a right to reserve streetside public parking in front of your house (e.g. for a week-long construction project). Historically you can go to city hall or the like, give your schedule, and pay a fee. But then they decided to put the reservation system exclusively online. Cash payers are excluded. Offline people are excluded. People who are online but do not want to share their email address with an office that uses Microsoft for their email are also excluded.
② You have a right to unemployment benefits. But the unemployment office goes online and forces you to solve a Google reCAPTCHA. Google’s reCAPTCHA often refuses to serve the puzzles to Tor users. People who are on clearnet may be unable to solve the CAPTCHA. Some people /can/ solve it but object to feeding a system that helps Google profit because they boycott Google.
③ You have a right to vote. But the voter registration process exposes your sensitive information to the tech giant Cloudflare and Amazon. Even if you register on paper, the data entry workers will expose your data to Cloudflare and Amazon anyway.
④ You have a right to energy access. But the energy company refuses cash payments so you are forced to open a bank account. All banks force you into a situation that goes against your beliefs. E.g. forcing you to obtain from Google a closed-source app to run on a smartphone (which you may not even have), or the bank’s website is Cloudflared and you will not share your sensitive financial info with CF. And the banks either have no analog/offline means of service, or the offline services are costly.
⑤ A public school excludes students who are unwilling to use Facebook, Google, Cloudflare, and Microsoft products & services. Anyone can attend but those who refuse to feed the corporate surveillance capitalists are put at a great disadvantage perhaps to the extent that they cannot pass their classes.
Not all those examples are real. E.g. in the real life scenario of case ② I think there is an offline option (but not sure during a pandemic). So my question is hypothetical— assume there is no pathway to service except for satisfying the barriers to entry.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 21:
“2. Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.”
Some nuances can be extracted from the examples:
A) You are incapable of exercising your right yourself. E.g. blind and the CAPTCHA requires vision, or you are not tech literate enough to follow the tech process. But you can hire someone to do the work for you.
B) You are capable of exercising your rights but unwilling to accept the conditions. Hiring someone may or may not be possible depending on whether your personal conditions can be accommodated.
So the big question is, for groups A and B: are rights being violated?
Group B is the more interesting one. A common attitude is: those people have “preferences” and their rights are not violated when their preference is not respected. I find that quite harsh. When a right becomes conditional by the institutions who are supposed to support the right, IMO the conditions (which are not written in law) are inherently excluding people. If a right is going to be made conditional, isn’t there some kind of legal principle that the conditions be codified into law and not some arbitrary condition that a systems administrator decided was a good idea?
#rightToBeOffline #rightToBeAnalog
UPDATE
This question was answered in !philosophy@mander.xyz.
It sounds like you want all the perks of society without participating at all. You’re free to live anonymously and completely offline but the world has moved on to faster, more efficient digital systems.
I’m fully aware that most of the gains have gone to the executive department, but (most of) the things you mentioned have reduced costs for the rest of us.
People who are online but do not want to share their email address with an office that uses Microsoft for their email are also excluded.
Self-imposed punishment. “A guy I don’t like works at ComEd, therefore I can’t pay my bill and my rights are being violated” is toddler logic
“2. Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.”
You’re applying this wrong. You have equal access, you’d just be refusing to follow the steps of the system. It’s like claiming you don’t have access to the library because it’s against your beliefs to enter buildings.
It sounds like you want all the perks of society
Where do you live that basic rights & services like voting, education, & energy are considered “perks”?
without participating at all.
All 5 examples reflect people being blocked from participation. The will to vote is to want to participate in democracy.
You’re free to live anonymously and completely offline
Not exactly, no. When rights are put at odds with each other, that’s not freedom. In some US states you can EITHER have the right to vote OR the right to privacy, but not both. Alaska gives voters both a right to privacy and simultaneously a right to vote. In the battleground swing state of Georgia, you must choose between the two rights.
(most of) the things you mentioned have reduced costs for the rest of us.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was not written to save you money. The elitism of marginalizing some people for the financial gains of others is precisely what happens without the UDHR. The UDHR was created to thwart that imbalance and exclusion. So I can’t say I put much stock into what you assert about the application of human rights at this point.
Self-imposed punishment.
When an oppressive policy says you can have a right to privacy or you can have a right to use public space but not both, that ultimatum not self-imposed. Whatever you choose between the two rights is your choice, but the loss of the other right is not self-imposed when in fact it would be possible to have both rights at the same time.
You’re applying this wrong. You have equal access, you’d just be refusing to follow the steps of the system.
So when lawmakers write law that includes everyone but a system admin deploys an exclusive system, you seem to believe any arbitrary limitations that a system administrator (who was not elected) decides to impose on users complies with equality obligations… that some admin can make an off-the-cuff decision to push a CAPTCHA that not everyone can solve because everyone has an equal chance of clicking on squares. Correct?
I’m not sure why you’ve used the captcha system twice when it has accessibility built in. You can listen to an audio clip instead.
But this all boils down to the CHOICES you’re making. You’re CHOOSING to not work with companies who use Microsoft services, you aren’t prevented from it. You’re not denied access for who you are as a person, you’re denied due to limitations you’ve set for yourself
And yeah, living completely offline means you lose some of the privileges of society because you’ve disconnected from society. You’ve chosen to be an outsider but you still want a say in what happens on the inside…why? You can have all these things if you join the team. Otherwise you’re on your own
That’s just how stuff works, the world is not a utopia.
I’m not sure why you’ve used the captcha system twice when it has accessibility built in. You can listen to an audio clip instead.
CAPTCHAs come in many forms and often do not have accessibility built in (e.g. the Cloudflare ones do not). I fail the CAPTCHA despite having all my senses, because I can’t tell the difference between the close-up view of a scooter dashboard & instrument panel and a sports bike dashboard and instrument panel (even though I have years of experience driving a motorcycle). In the last few years I don’t even get a CAPTCHA puzzle. No chance to even click squares if I wanted to because of a “network rate error”. Google has arbitrarily decided to exclude me for unknown reasons to me but for them the reason is clear: marginalizing me is better for business. Google does not make human rights decisions, it makes business decisions for its shareholders. It’s extremely naïve to think a gov can hand over public services to Google.
But this all boils down to the CHOICES you’re making.
We’re talking about choices that were made before I even encounter a choice of my own. The system comes into existence before I attempt to use it. The choice of a public service to decide who they will exclude from service is not my choice.
You’re not denied access for who you are as a person, you’re denied due to limitations you’ve set for yourself
Systems administrators are making access to rights conditional on variables that exclude people. When a right becomes conditional, it’s then inherently exclusive. Choosing not to compromise my own privacy is not choosing a limitation. It’s the contrary. Privacy is about control. Having privacy is having freedom. When you choose to needlessly give up privacy to access a system, that’s a case of self-limiting.
And yeah, living completely offline means you lose some of the privileges
Fundamental rights are not “privileges”. Nor does that logic follow. People always had offline options in the past, thus proving that (what you call privileges) need not be lost.
because you’ve disconnected from society.
the loss of rights by offline people is not a loss that they caused. It’s a loss that was caused by a system that decided to start excluding them. Three years ago offline people could reserve public parking in front of their house. Today they cannot. The system changed to exclude them.
Those rights are given to people by the system. A system you’re choosing to not be involved it. I’m not mad at Canada for not providing me with clean drinking water because…I’m not Canadian.
I’d be happy to agree to disagree or to it down to one topic at a time but I’m having a hard time with this conversation because it’s hitting way too many things at once and I’m not invested enough to review every paragraph to reply, sorry.