Comment on When exercise of rights is made conditional on use of technology, is the right violated?
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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 6 months ago
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 for 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 entirely, they can shorten or eliminate gym classes so equality is maintained amid resource shortages.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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 6 months 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. Thus, 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.
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. Offline procedures are the only way to include everyone under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights article 21.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I guess where I live there’s always offline alternatives, even the parking meters still accept coins even though they also take credit cards.
In any case it’s not like countries actually provide all of the other articles. For the US, vacation and healthcare aren’t provided, so it’s not surprising the other articles are not followed either. It’s not really a law.