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Comment by artificial | Hacker News Reader

Which country are you from where privacy is a right?

California Constitution. Article 1, Section 1: "All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy." https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

(not a country of course, but somewhere privacy is a constitutional right. question then is how a state can protect this right)

To be fair, the "pursuit" of those things are considered natural rights. Not the things themselves.

Not saying that a right to privacy doesn't exist. I think it exists because a combination of other rights DO exist. But rights can't obligate others, and if your information ends up in the public sphere, I don't believe you have a natural right to have it taken down.

If you contracted with a third party, and as part of that exchange, your info was supposed to be secured, you have a right to secure damages within the scope of that contract.

"...pursuing and obtaining..."

Yep, that's what the legal language says.

It's obviously not workable, though; you can see that the goal listed before "privacy" which all Californians have the legal right to obtain is "happiness". This would appear to imply that you have the same legal rights against someone who violates your privacy as against someone who makes you unhappy.

http://www.theonion.com/article/proposed-bill-would-bring-40...

> The bill, H.R. 702, stipulates that immediately upon its passage into law, the 4,000 brave soldiers who have lost their lives in Iraq come marching triumphantly over the horizon, directly into the arms of their loved ones, looking the same as they did on the day they left home.

So if you pursue but don't obtain happiness, due you get to sue the State of California for infringing on your inalienable and guaranteed state rights?

Does this mean Telcos/payfone can be sued in CA for being in violation of the constitution?

No. Federal preemption.

That does not preclude anyone from filing regarding violations of the state constitution. There's that whole right to address ones grievances that gets in the way.

Unfortunately, it does.[1] See the Supreme Court decision in Cellco Partnership d/b/a Verizon Wireless v. Hatch. [2] FCC-regulated entities are not subject to state consumer protection laws.

[1] https://www.wileyrein.com/practices-federal-preemption.html [2] http://sblog.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/11-...

I didn't say anything about consumer protection laws - I explicitly stated violations of the state constitution.

California isn't a country, no matter how much their government wishes they were.

Privacy is a fundamental right of EU residents (it’s in the fundamental charter)

It's Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_8_of_the_European_Conv...

Yep, my operator isn't allowed to give out any information without my written consent. And you actually have to OPT IN for the phonebook service. Most people don't.

And the sky hasn't fallen, my service is quite good and the telcos are still making profits.

Thing is,the US Constitution as brilliant as it is was written a long time ago and nobody wants to update it. And Capitol Hill seems preoccupied.

Don't want to remind the states that they have the option, they might vote in term limits or remove money from politics.

Which is why every European country except Germany has dozens of cameras on every corner?

Those corners would be public spaces, right?

You have a messed-up idea of privacy, there can be various degrees of it and having a few people see you in a certain place at a certain time has a slightly different impact than having someone (potentially) analyze what you do in a large amount of your life, even if that happens in "public spaces".

I know your idea is the same as that of the USA law, but that really doesn't make it right

This is simply false

But (at least in most countries) these records are only available to police and with written request, one by one basis.

or to anyone connected to the internet

You can't leave unprotected access by law, because you, as a camera owner, are responsible for personal information stored as a record. If you talking about hacking, I wouldn't worry too much -- anything can be hacked and there are much more cost effective ways to obtain personal information in millions than hacking cameras one-by-one.

You can't leave unprotected access by law

Yeah, nice theory :)

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I wouldn't worry/care about individual hackers, but even if you have complete trust in everyone who has or will have legal access there are a lot of organizations for which hacking cameras one-by-one (even if hacking is actually needed) is well worth the effort.

Do you have any substantiation of "except Germany"?

Not OP, but in the United States, Americans' right to privacy is protected by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

From the government. It’s a small, but important distinction.

Unfortunately, the relevance of the Fourth Amendment to informational privacy within cyberspace has been significantly diminished due to piecemeal legislation that has not been internally consistent and a fundamental misinterpreting of what constitutes private information. As it stands, informational privacy in the U.S. is severely lacking in constitutional protections. States do attempt to fill these holes with statutes but even then their conceptual frameworks are based on an understanding of privacy that isn't directly applicable to the digital world.

I'd say that in Germany if it's not a de jure right it's very much a de facto one.

With the NetzDG things have pretty much changed IMO. Your privacy can be invaded without any "proven" reason.

Does a right need to be written down to be a right? Perhaps some human rights transcend the legal system of any specific country.

They went ahead and wrote it down.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12

> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

Without a way to enforce a right, it's worthless. Is the UN going to come to my rescue over this?

The US Constitution says no. That’s basically what the 9th and 10th amendments mean. The framers knew they couldn’t explicitly list every conceivable right, so they just said , ‘and, etc.’

All of the ECHR countries?

Roe v Wade, law of the land. One of the reasons why GOP hate it is it makes privacy a right rather than a product.

The "correct" way is, if a black man knocks up a guy's white daugher, he puts her on a plane to a state where abortion is legal. But in his own state, he fights for it to be illegal, so all the poor people have to have babies, and stay poor. Because classism is good. It makes sure some products can only be afforded by some people. Better people. And better people have more money, and buy more and better things.

Free market means being free to pay as little as absolutely possible for labor. And for that you need a lot of poor people. Everyone becoming wealthy is bad for better people. What's the point of being better if you can't be wealthier than most other people?

And if you think a white wealthy GOP dad won't overnight their daughter to a state to get an abortion, especially when it's from a brown dad, then you're ignorant to the point of cultural blindness.

Could you please refrain from posting inflammatory partisan comments, like we've asked before? You have to do a better job of maintaining an insight/provocation ratio that can sustain a civil conversation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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