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As with many things, I believe privacy is less of a binary issue and more of a scale between two extremes. I agree that with modern technology it would be diff
by d4mi3n 6y ago
As with many things, I believe privacy is less of a binary issue and more of a scale between two extremes.
I agree that with modern technology it would be difficult to guarantee or enforce absolute privacy in public spaces--everyone has a camera on them at all times these days! That said, I think the EU got it right with ideas like the right to be forgotten.
Knowing you were at a protest or frequented some store can be problematic depending on how that data is used and correlated. Knowing these things is also dangerous if this data sticks around for a long time--who's to say the political climate a few years from now will be anything like today?
Being able to look up every indiscretion somebody ever made can be a tactic for discrediting people or strong-arming them to do what you want. Cherry picking historical data about a person can make them look any way you want them to when presented to an audience of the public or your peers in court.
The thing I can't figure out is how we can find some middle ground in an ecosystem where not everybody will be acting in good faith. It's a real source of concern that deserves consideration.
- umvi 6y ago> That said, I think the EU got it right with ideas like the right to be forgotten. Does RTBF extend to post-mortem privacy as well? I think RTBF should expire once a person has died at the very least. i.e. people like Harvey Weinstein might use RTBF to scrub their public image, but I want to know all the details after he has died. Otherwise you effectively have a permanent history-scrubbing tool, which is never good.
- d4mi3n 6y agoThat's a great point and another reason why it usually doesn't make sense to take privacy to an extreme. At the end of the day, privacy is a matter of private interest against (debatable) public good. It's nice for an individual to be able to start from a clean slate. It's not so great for society at large when such people abuse the system to do harm to others.
- PeterisP 6y agoPrivacy laws in general grant specific rights to people; and legally corpses aren't people and don't have the same rights. There tend to be some limitations for information about the deceased which are generally framed from the perspective of protecting the rights of their living relatives; e.g. false accusations that your deceased spouse did something horrific can be interpreted as an unjust attack on your reputation and could be grounds for you to sue.