Tell HN: We'd better step up to protect privacy | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: We'd better step up to protect privacy

47 pointscouchand25 comments

The hacker community holds the right to privacy sacrosanct, and we understand more than most the hard fight that we all face trying to protect it.

That's why it's critical that we lend our support to fight for the right to privacy whenever it is threatened. Today, that threat comes from the Supreme Court. We have a duty to step up join the call for privacy today, or we shouldn't expect to see the support of others when it's our turn.

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We’ll need to overlook for a moment that a non-trivial fraction of users here work for companies that do everything they legally can to collect, extract, track, scan, ping, and infer every last byte of information they’re able to about people who aren’t even vaguely aware of it.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

-- Upton Sinclair

Is this about the draft opinion leak? Or a 4th Amendment related opinion that was issued recently? I don't quite understand how the Supreme Court is involved right now. The Court doesn't really have a good track record of understanding the threats to privacy that technology brings, but that's been the situation for some time.

The problem is that Roe v. Wade frames the right to have an abortion as stemming from the right to privacy, and in fact is the decision that created the concept of a Right to Privacy. So, in Theoretical Jurisprudence Land, the Right to Privacy is at risk, because it's tied to something much more controversial.

This is demonstrably untrue. Louis Brandeis (late Supreme Court justice) and his business partner Samuel Warren published an article called the "Right to Privacy" in 1890.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Privacy_(article)