Pirate Party Confused Privacy

Posted by Strangely Freedom, Internet Add comments

Aug 132009

There’s now an official UK Pirate Party.

It’s founded on the guiding principles that all art & creativity should be free for people sat in their bedrooms and that those people in the bedrooms should have absolute privacy!

True.

They want the Swedish model of the convicted file-sharers in the UK. Also, they want Google StreetView banned as well as all CCTV cameras.

Privacy.

Let’s look at privacy. (Art theft is now taken for granted by almost everyone and in the present technical world of secret digital information transfer across international borders, this will not and cannot be controlled. So it’s a fait-accompli.)

But for the low security-savvy downloaders in their bedrooms, they expect privacy in a weird dysfunctional way…

They’ll swallow the mantra of privacy yet open their computer systems to all sorts of malware because most pirate digital materiel is hosted on malware-ridden websites hosted in wholly unsavoury countries.

Now that’s weird!

They expect free broadband access for these ‘services’ but will pay top-dollar for the latest gadget or naff ring-tone. They’ll also pay for the ‘service’ of downloading ‘free’ copyright materiel as well…

Now that’s weird!

StreetView

Furthermore, the Pirate Party says it’s bad that a StreetView camera car, driving down the public highway can look into the bedrooms of the File Sharers…. er…. have they not heard of curtains? Do they not realise that glass is two-way?

Real Privacy

Here’s how real privacy works:

Computer: use a firewall
Net Curtains

House: use curtains or a tall fence or wall

Simple? Innit?

And this is how the Queen keeps prying eyes from her back garden…

View Larger Map

Phone Privacy

I’ve just had a call from a woman offering me a government grant for loft insulation…. I asked her,

Who exactly do you work for?

…she then plonked the phone down on me after a little mutter. However, a 1471 on her produced this phone number:

01702 340105

When I called her back it was busy (presumably trying to con someone else)..! However, in the UK, without paying for the information, I cannot find the owner of that telephone – In the USA however, there are heaps of services that do just that!

This is another example of the confused idea of “privacy” that the UK has. It’s crap!

Meanwhile, there’s now a political party lobbying for the right to steal art and the right to be private while doing it!
Here are Richard Stallman’s views on the Pirate Party: How the Swedish Pirate Party Platform Backfires on Free Software

I think the mantra, (paraphrasing the Hippocratic oath) should be: