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[answered] When exercise of rights is made conditional on use of technology, is the right violated? (links.hackliberty.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org to c/philosophy@mander.xyz

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cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/213918

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

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[–] Tatar_Nobility@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

This in a sense pertains to the privacy vs. security debate. When both are principles that are consecrated (to different extents) by the law, the legislator and judge have to put some effort i to conciliating the two. This is done respectively through exceptions and criteria of appreciation.

Regarding your question: from a positivist standpoint, rights are constructions by the State granted to particulars. They can be taken and given in a whim by virtue of a legal text or jurisprudence. If one finds that a certain (not prescribed) conditioning is unfairly hindering their enjoyment of a right, then the matter should be sttled in court.

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?

In administrative law, the principle of legality provides that public administration must only act according to the law. In other words, the submission of the administration to the law serves as a garantee to citizens from arbitrary, administrative action. Whenever the administrator violates a general principle of law (bonus points if the constitution consecrates it), legal action via the court is almost guaranteed to overturn the act.

In the (hypothetical) case of limiting certain public services to online platforms, one can make the case for a violation to the right to access public services without undue empediment. However, if the public interest calls for limitations, then said right will accordingly be conditioned.

[–] soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I appreciate the detailed feedback, which I think probably answers my question as well as possible from a utilitarian standpoint to a usable extent.

I primarily needed to verify that when speaking at rallies I would not be falsely informing people or pushing an indefensible position. If a public service is made exclusive even per a loose interpretation whereby objectionable conditions stand as a barrier, it seems fair enough to at least claim that rights are being violated all the way to the courthouse, and inside the courthouse, until a judge determines otherwise. You gave me the confidence I was after.

[–] essellburns@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

You Sir, are a paragon of clarity, balance and accuracy. My respect.

[–] CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you mean equitable access? Doesn’t equal access just means the public service doesn’t discriminate? If they create a condition that everyone has to meet instead of just a subset then that’s still equal access.

But ultimately the spirit of your argument is that I don’t think it’s practical for organizations with limited resources to accommodate everyone, so they strive to handle the majority.

[–] soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

In a lot of cases, they can accommodate everyone but simply neglect to.

E.g. the public parking service was originally offline, thus proving they had the resources to accommodate offline people. They recently decided to take that away and exclusively serve online people. If they somehow lost resources and have to choose one or the other, choosing offline option accommodates more people because online people can also function offline (but not vice-versa). I’m also not sure how resources fall short, because you don’t get to reserve parking for free. You pay a fee to reserve parking, so the people are bringing the resources to cover their own request.

The online option is more exclusive than the offline option. Lines are being drawn in ways that create inequality. If they need to save money, they can save money in ways that have equal impact. E.g. instead of a public school excluding some people from education entirely, they can shorten or eliminate gym classes so equality is maintained amid resource shortages.

[–] CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think it’s a different argument that your public services are poorly run and are making bad decisions. In this case the recourse in a democratic society is to speak up or vote to change the local government.

Obviously incompetence and corruption always exist so YMMV.

[–] soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The thesis of the thread is essentially to fight against digital exclusion. Part of that fight is to get a big spotlight on the infringement of existing rights.

It’s very rare that I find an online public service that’s well run. I demand the same level of privacy protection that I had in the offline procedures. This implies the ability to use Tor in the very least among other things like not having to expose email to Microsoft. Most normies are not even technically competent enough to know what Tor is. The normies on my side of this fight are excluded for other reasons, like tech illiteracy. Without the tech illiterates on my side I would be isolated and trivially easy to marginalize.

The only practical solution is having an offline option for every public service. It’s impossible to train public administrations to be competent enough to process Tor traffic, to run in-house mail servers & install PGP so sensitive info is not exposed to surveillance capitalists, and then to also train all tech illiterate citizens to be able to use these systems. It’s impossible. Even if it were possible, how do you serve cash payers without bank accounts? Offline procedures are the only way to include everyone under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights article 21.