
The Right to Privacy (1890) - d0ne
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/privacy/Privacy_brand_warr2.html
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michaelmrose
"The right to privacy does not prohibit any publication of matter which is of
public or general interest. "

This is not only nearly impossible to define in the general case more
importantly what is of legitimate interest to me is potentially different from
what is of legitimate interest to you and only by allowing the general
publication of facts is it possible for the information relevant to you and i
to each flow freely.

" The design of the law must be to protect those persons with whose affairs
the community has no legitimate concern, from being dragged into an
undesirable and undesired publicity and to protect all persons, whatsoever;
their position or station, from having matters which they may properly prefer
to keep private, made public against their will."

If I intend to hire you to watch my kids, work in my store, allow you to hang
out with my daughter etc etc I have an interest in information about you being
available.

" The right of one who has remained a private individual, to prevent his
public portraiture, presents the simplest case for such extension; the right
to protect one's self from pen portraiture, from a discussion by the press of
one's private affairs"

This is great if the press is a handful of newspapers instead of the reality
in which it is all of us communicating to each other.

I could go on and on and on but the problem remains that the "right to
privacy" so defined is fundamentally impossible to distinguish from a club to
stop people spreading the truth.

It would be more useful to continue punishing liars and try to better protect
people from being fired/discriminated against for their private lives and
speech rather than providing the rich a better way to silence inconvenient
truths.

~~~
nabla9
>This is not only nearly impossible to define in the general case

And this is why there are courts who decide how law applies in particular
cases. This is how case law works. What the law means gets more meaning as
precedents accumulate over time.

~~~
elcapitan
That law is kind of an abstract algorithm that automatically applies to every
case based on some general parameters is a misconception that I have seen
quite a lot around here. Maybe the habit to think in abstract patterns doesn't
really combine well with messy real-world phenomena like case law?

Related: "Trial by Machine"
[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2743800](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2743800)

