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Comment by ziddoap | Hacker News Reader

>Yet, my privacy rights always imply a lessening of someone else's right to knowledge.

Is there a "right to knowledge"?

I'm aware of rights to speech, thought, movement, conscious, religion, expression, assembly, association, etc. But I've never heard anyone claim, or read any charter/constitution/etc. that has a "right to knowledge" clause.

Is there a country which has enshrined a "right to knowledge"? Does it have any limits (alluding to what you mentioned, how does the right to knowledge interact with other rights)?

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The thoughts in your head, and the information you gather belongs to you and you get to make decisions about how it's used. If it helps think of it as intellectual property, or perhaps an extension of bodily autonomy in less corporate terms.

It's so fundamental a right that most places only enshrine more complicated versions of it as law. Most societies now even extend that right to offer control over the knowledge you store electronically or write down and the way other people get to use "your" knowledge.

When we seek to impose privacy limitations on the data that others can gather we're curtailing those rights to some extent. We're telling them there are specific things they can't know and that does limit their freedom in a very fundamental way.

> a "right to knowledge"?

it's the right to observe somebody else without their consent: it's quiet scientific observation that tries not to disturb the observed which is impossible in the quantum level but very realistic in the day to day classic (non-quantum) level

tl;dr: the right to create knowledge i.e. do science

I think you're being sarcastic, but you've missed the point.

The point, restated, is this: When we pass laws that say "There are factually true things that you are not allowed to know under penalty of law" we had better be damn sure the tradeoff is worth it. Sometimes it will be, sometimes it won't. The exact line will always be ill-defined.

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