The amazing “Mike” from TechDirt has trashed technophobia very nicely in a post about a group calling for regulation of camera phones. Technophobes wanted laws requiring cars to be preceeded by a person walking along waving a red flag. Technophobes want mandates that camera phones should flash or click. As if someone wanting to misuse a camera phone wouldn’t disable the flash or click.
There are a host of ways that society closes in around new technologies to distill their benefits and filter out potential harms. I suppose I tried to describe this in my paper on RFID, linked here so many times in the past. The privacy consequences of camera phones will be ameliorated, just like the privacy consequences of cameras were.
It’s easy to parade around the horribles of new technologies. It’s heavy lifting to ameliorate the harms, but we’re way better if we do so through natural societal processes than by hamstringing technology with government mandates.
Viva TLF!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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