Privacy and the digital native

“In designing a legal solution to the problems presented by digital dossiers, it would be a terrible mistake to lose sight of the fact that this world is more connected than ever before. [...] Data about digital natives freely crosses geographic and political borders, unfettered in virtually all instances. [For example, anyone from outside of the US who uses a US-based system is doing business with a foreign company.] The problem is that the protections [a person] enjoys in one country may not protect her in another context online. Any set of solutions we come up with needs to take these cross-border considerations to heart.

“It is also important to bear in mind the costs of privacy regulation. To date, privacy laws come not only with high costs but also, sometimes, with flaws in design and implementation. Privacy protections may run up against free-speech rights [...]. Consider [a Digital Native who] posts pictures, names and possible IM names or cell-phone numbers of her classmates online to create her own social network site. Under European data-protection laws, her activity, no matter how well intended, may be a violation of data-protection laws. But this is not the case int he United States*, where free speech in many instances trumps privacy. American law has yet to catch up to the changes in the way that Digital Natives are leading their social lives in networked publics.

- Palfrey & Gasser, Born Digital

 

*Editor’s note: This book was published in 2008. It is possible that the law has changed by now.

Task:

Identify the structural features and linguistic cues that the authors used to develop their argument.

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Questions:

Discuss the impacts of globalisation.

Free speech and privacy cannot co-exist. Discuss.

Mentally Ill Offenders Strain Juvenile System

“We’re seeing more and more mentally ill kids who couldn’t find community programs that were intensive enough to treat them,” said Joseph Penn, a child psychiatrist at the Texas Youth Commission. “Jails and juvenile justice facilities are the new asylums.”

At least 32 states cut their community mental health programs by an average of 5 percent this year and plan to double those budget reductions by 2010, according to a recent survey of state mental health offices.

Juvenile prisons have been the caretaker of last resort for troubled children since the 1980s, but mental health experts say the system is in crisis, facing a soaring number of inmates reliant on multiple — and powerful — psychotropic drugs and a shortage of therapists.

- New York Times

Question:

How far do you agree that our system of dealing with youth crime is flawed?

Comprehension practice: Paradox

Under a plan to reduce the state juvenile inmate population, many youths who once would have been held by the state are now detained by the Los Angeles County juvenile detention system. Los Angeles County is also under a federal mandate to improve psychiatric services for juvenile inmates, especially at the six camps at its Challenger Memorial Youth Center, which holds most of the county’s medium- and high-risk offenders and most of its mentally ill ones.

“We were told that the Challenger camps are, paradoxically, the only camps at which staff are authorized to carry O.C. spray,” wrote federal civil rights investigators in a 2008 report to county authorities, referring to oleoresin capsicum, known as pepper spray. “One supervisor told us that he believed that allowing staff to carry and use O.C. spray made sense given the ‘mental health population.’ ”

- New York Times

“We were told that the Challenger camps are, paradoxically, the only camps at which staff are authorized to carry O.C. spray,”

Explain the paradox in the above statement.

[See this post on how to answer questions on paradox]