Hi Graham, You seem to be conflating a right to privacy with an obligation to it. There's a huge difference between insisting that the Sentinelese avail themselves of Internet privacy versus creating the conditions to guarantee it is available if they want it. Furthermore, unless they have a keen sense of mental telepathy, the *do* have what I sincerely hope is privacy of a type that must be considered a universal right. How about we start there and work outward. At what point do you disagree? · You have a right to privacy in the sensations you experience. · You have a right to privacy in the sensations you experience through bio-augmentation such as a hearing aid. · You have a right to privacy in your own feelings. · You have a right to privacy in your own thoughts once articulated into mental words and/or images. · You have a right to privacy in your own thoughts once articulated in hand-written form in a journal. · You have a right to privacy in your own thoughts articulated in digital form using hardware and software you own. · You have a right to privacy in your own thoughts articulated in digital form, deliberately encrypted and transmitted or stored on public infrastructure. · You have a right to privacy in your own thoughts articulated digitally and stored in a private cloud database. Now that we are augmenting humans with bionic organs and limbs, using human-machine interfaces that transmit and receive intentionality, are we to take the position that these are never private? That the real-time location, status, sensiorial and actuation history of these devices is less privacy protected than the natural human instances of the same organs or limbs? Because that is the result with the policy as you've described it. Skip forward another decade or two. Once we have the technology to directly read a person's thoughts are we to abandon privacy altogether? As technology advances, at what point do you personally plan to finally adopt the position that just because we can doesn't mean we should? When that day comes where you draw the line, do you expect to implement the supporting technological, policy and legal frameworks from scratch? Or will you then gratefully acknowledge as necessary all the work that today you disparage and dismiss, and give thanks that someone had the foresight to say "hey, privacy is important" and fight for it back when the problem was still manageable? Or is it your position that that day will never come and no technology is too invasive? Kind regards, -- T.Rob From: Graham Reginald Hill [mailto:
] Hi Dele Thanks for your considered response. Like you I agree that there are some things that should remain truly private, some things that I am willing to exchange for something of value and some things that I am happy to have in the public domain. Although I would like to have a degree of control over which things are known about me, I recognise that is not always possible, nor necessarily desirable. As John Donne poetically wrote, 'No man is an island!'. The problem with privacy as a fundamental human right is a cultural and moral one. Just because we desire a degree of privacy in the West does not mean that it is indeed, a human right applicable to all. Do Westerners have the moral right to insist that their version of moraity is any better in any way than, say the Sentinelese of the Indian Andaman Islands where tribesmen go naked all of the time? Do Westerners have the moral right to insist that the Sentinelese wear clothes, or practice organised religion, or put their children through a Western education. Obviously not. This is the problem with absolute morality and so called universal human rights. Including the so called right to privacy. Best regards from Bishopsgate, London, Graham -- Gesendet: Donnerstag, 14. August 2014 um 15:48 Uhr I do think this is a commonly misunderstood and mischievously discussed subject. I think even in the most utopian models of social organisation privacy is a fundamental prerequisite. The merits and failings of surveillance marketing as termed here are a related but separate and different matter. I would argue that privacy is a fundamental of the human condition and of human decency. A simple example of this is toilets and bathrooms. We are not doing anything wrong when we go to use a toilet but it is not an activity that would benefit from mass transparency or one we wish to share with all. By this we can see that privacy is a fundamental of human decency. Clothes again are similar. My wearing clothes does not mean I have something to hide it is simply a way for me to keep what is private to me just that. To propose a society where privacy is no longer needed would mean that we would essentially have to redefine the human condition in a fundamental way from our understanding of what it is now. And to what end? To serve what benefit one would have to ask. I know this is a somewhat base metaphor but I think it's important to look at this matter from such a primal perspective to appropriately contextualise the debate. A world without privacy is a world of naked people in every context imaginable. Some might see this as a utopia of sorts but others see it as a dystopia, as a sort of mass concentration camp. I struggle to see how nakedness of such a manner in and of itself represents progress particularly when those calling for such nakedness from the masses are shielded and clothed themselves. Sent from Digitterra
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