2 ms·
The right to privacy falls under the "human rights" part of my comment. You are free to disagree that privacy in some meaningful sense is not a human right, but
by john_b 13y ago
The right to privacy falls under the "human rights" part of my comment. You are free to disagree that privacy in some meaningful sense is not a human right, but the very fact that so many other rights (both legal and human) are easily compromised when it is not present is a strong hurdle to overcome, should you wish to make that argument.
As an example, you have the right to criticize your employer (freedom of speech). For obvious reasons, this right is best exercised in private, where the employer cannot overhear the conversation. If the employer operated a massive surveilance network that recorded your supposedly private conversations, you could then suffer punitive consequences and be denied career opportunities merely for voicing an opinion.
You have a legal right to an attorney, but that right is only useful because your discussions with your attorney are confidential. Without that privacy, the whole value of the right simply evaporates.
My view is that the right to privacy is such an obvious prerequisite for most, if not all, of our legal rights to have any value that it shouldn't need to be explicitly detailed in the Constitution or in any specific law. Furthermore, the world the Founders lived in was a world in which privacy was easy to safeguard, and the few obvious ways to violate it (e.g. unreasonable searches and seizures) were addressed by the Bill of Rights.
- rayiner 13y ago> You are free to disagree that privacy in some meaningful sense is not a human right I don't disagree that privacy in some meaningful sense is a human right. I disagree that a "privacy" right that is broad enough to encompass information about me collected by a private company based on my voluntary use of its service (i.e. phone call records) rises to the level of human right. To me, that's instead a matter of balancing of competing interests to be handled through the democratic process. When I think of privacy being a "human right" I'm thinking more of the government not invading the sanctity of your home, not how it can access information you already freely share with others.
- john_b 13y agoNot sure why you're being downvoted. One of the main problems with privacy today is that your rights to privacy are typically enumerated in lengthy terms of service or user agreements that can and do change without notice. If these documents truly do enumerate "rights" they shouldn't be so easily changed whenever the company finds it convenient or profitable. What you initially agreed to was a 20 page document written in legalese that few will bother to read through. If you truly want to be informed and up to date on your privacy rights for all of the services you use, you basically have to make it a full time job. It's not a sustainable system. What we need is some sort of societally accepted norms, and possibly laws, regarding privacy so that you don't have to hire a lawyer to give you a monthly update explaining what Facebook can and can't do with the data you and your friends provide them. My point is that whatever norms or laws that result from those considerations will be arbitrary unless they are based firmly on a respect for an individual's human right to privacy.
- harryh 13y agoIt seems to me that we do have "societally accepted norms, and possibly laws, regarding privacy." The norms/laws are that the information you share freely with Google/FB/Verizon/etc can be passed along to the gov't in support of national security. These norms/laws aren't arbitrary, they're based on the views of the majority of the citizens of this country, expressed through the democratic process.