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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

> Privacy laws must prevent arbitrary or unlawful interference, but privacy is not absolute.

This is really it in a nutshell. They say this like it is assumed, but this is actually a new beachhead in the war on individual rights. There seems to me something sacred about the idea that I as a human being can exchange thoughts with another without those thoughts being appropriated by the government. It seems to fundamentally violate something about what it means to be human to say that my thoughts are not really mine: they belong first and foremost to the government, then I can have them. Is there anything about us humans that is really totally belongs to us, or are we nothing in and of ourselves, just mechanisms to serve the functioning of a government?

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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights covers Freedom of thought:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_thought

HOWEVER, it DOESN'T cover Cognitive liberty:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_liberty#Relationship...

And here, one may find the crux of the matter:

As long as you, me, we, Humanity, continue to neglect making Cognitive liberty part of the UDHR, we will keep running into this problem over and over and over again.

Cognitive liberty IMPLIES privacy. Perhaps this explains why no megascale effort exists to make it part of UHDR.

What do I mean by megascale?

Where may one find the blacked out websites?

Where may one find the DAILY protest marches over it?

Where may one find absolutely primal, animalistic outrage over it?

Certainly not on the 24/7 news cycle.

This. A hundred years ago, if you wrote a diary, it was a private diary; if you wrote a letter, it was a private letter; and if you had a conversation, it was a private conversation. Now, your own thoughts no longer belong only to you.

A hundred years ago if you wrote a diary it was a private diary unless you were involved in a crime, at which point it was read as evidence. If you wrote a letter it was a private letter unless you were involved in a crime, at which point it was read as evidence. Of course, if you were involved in d in espionage or similar large scale crimes your letters were read in transit.

You lived in a small town where everyone knew everything about you: who you talked to, what you said, what books you read and what you did to entertain yourself. If you were one of the small minority who lived in a large town you were still known in your neighborhood and had daily patterns that were easy to observe to anyone that wanted to know.

It is admirable to object to the current policies of various governments when it comes to digital privacy and liberty, but do not paint the past as some place where this privacy once existed. It is a simple fact that in your lifetime you and your peers have enjoyed a greater degree of privacy than any other cohort in the history of humanity. Demand more protection from government actions because of the commensurate growth in the scope of what governments can observe and analyze, not because of some lost blissful state of private existence you imagine an ancestor once claimed.

> It is a simple fact that in your lifetime you and your peers have enjoyed a greater degree of privacy than any other cohort in the history of humanity.

That's as untrue as it can be. At no point in history all people's physical movements, communications, and purchases were tracked and stored in a personally identifiable form for an unlimited amount time by global companies operating in foreign jurisdictions.

I'm late here, but you two seem to be talking about two different versions of privacy.

My read is that evgen is saying "for most of human history, the work required to stay alive has forced humans into the open and exposed much of their lives and movements to their neighbors and community. In this way, humans have not had privacy."

You responded that today companies and governments have much finer-grained data about us and our behaviors than they did even 10 years ago, let alone 50 or 100. True, but these are different claims.

I think we've gained the first kind of privacy and still experienced the privacy loss you mention.

You are right, and I think that his argument about increased offline privacy is completely valid. But what I meant in my initial comment, is that now if I start a new personal document on Google Docs, or if I upload an existing .doc file into Dropbox, I have no control over who, when and for what purpose will access it without my explicit permission. It doesn't necessarily have to be a government agency, whose requests for data don't even require judge's approval in the US[1]. It can even be a machine learning algorithm building a profile on me.

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/judge-orders-google-customer-data...

Privacy is not the same as free speech - the thoughts are still yours but can be monitored if there is a threat to public safety as judged by our judicial system (which by all means should be continuously improved). Most individual rights are not absolute - we can be detained if suspected of having a dangerous disease, we're not allowed to shout "there's a bomb!", we can be followed & our homes searched if we're suspected of criminality by a judge, our children can be taken away if we severely neglect our responsibilities to them, etc...

Most individual rights are not absolute

Indeed, they can't be, because rights and freedoms that we value often conflict, and then we have to determine which of two good things we should prioritise when we would like to support both if that were possible.

Still, there is a reason that legal systems tend to place protection of fundamental rights and freedoms high up, such that it requires a more serious harm to the rights and freedoms of others to justify infringing on them. It's to challenge the erosion of legal protections by successive temporary governments at the expense of the people.

If governments want to mandate an end to meaningful security in telecommunications, that is both a practical threat to everyone's safety in numerous small ways and a more fundamental threat to the nature of democracy itself. To justify such a draconian measure, the harm to other rights and freedoms that is being defended against must be greater.

In my experience, neither my own government nor its allies has got within the same galaxy as clearing that bar yet, and that is why I do not support this kind of proposal and will typically vote against anyone who does regardless of any other policies they have.

The right to private communication ought to be absolute. It is after all related to the right to express oneself through encrypted means. Limiting the right to private communication requires limiting the right to generate encrypted communication, meaning that it requires violating free speech.

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