While I don’t want to say that all privacy advocates are the bad kind of crybabies that I described on my previous post there are certainly a lot I would call hypocrite when it gets to things like the loyalty schemes I already wrote about.
So as I said on that post, the main complain about loyalty scheme involve possible involvement with bad government (in which case we have a completely different problem), and basically have to do with hypothetical scenarios of a dystopian future. So what they are afraid of is not the proper use of the tool that is loyalty schemes, but of their abuse.
On the other hand, the same kind of persons advocate for tools like Tor, Bitcoin, Liberty Reserve or FreedomBox. These tools are supposed to help people fight repressive governments among others, but there are obvious drawbacks. Pirates use the same technologies. And so do cybercriminals (and other kind of criminals too).
Where I see a difference is that while even the Irish Times struggled to find evidence of the privacy invasion, or governmental abuse of loyalty schemes (as you probably noticed they had to resort complaining about a pregnant teenager who was found out through target advertising), it’s extremely easy to find evidence of the cyber organized crime relying on tools like Liberty Reserve. Using the trump card of paedophiles would probably be a bad idea, but I’d bet my life on many of them doing so.
Yes of course there are plenty of honest possible uses you could have for these technologies, but I’d also think that if you start with the assumption that your government is not completely corrupted or abusive (which, I know, could be considered a very fantastic assumption), and that you don’t just want to ignore anti-piracy laws because you don’t like them (while I still agree that many of those laws are completely idiotic, I have explained my standing already), then the remaining positive uses are marginal, compared to the criminal activities that they enable.
Am I arguing against Tor and FreedomBox? Not really. But I am arguing against things like MegaUpload, Liberty Reserve and Bitcoin — and I would say that most people who are defending Kim Dotcom and the likes of him are not my peers. I would push them together with the religious people I’m acquainted with, which is to say, I keep them at arm’s length.