Comment by leot
12 years ago
If privacy is a human right, it's not (to me, at least) of the same caliber as "life, liberty, and security of person". People behave best because they have internalized social norms, those arguments and attitudes that we proudly expose.
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
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.
Otherwise, how would you define "liberty" or "security of person"? You're free to do what you want as long as it doesn't encroach on the freedom of others, and if being spied on makes you not want to do some things you ought to be able to do, then that's just tough luck, but not a restriction on liberty or your security? I'd say freedom of action is worthless without freedom of thought and speech, and that you can't pick and choose human rights, or rank them.
Things aren't that simple. Certain rights can certainly override others (your right to life overrides my liberty to shoot you), which implies, if not a ranking, at least complexity. My liberty was only legally maximized when I turned 19: should five-year-olds be able to buy guns? Should I be free to record a conversation we have without my telling you?
A person has liberty if he or she is free to do anything lawful within a just framework of laws that is fairly enforced. Everything you do has consequences, however. Your freedom is thus freedom from having government stopping you from doing things that are within the law, but not freedom from consequences. (Note that article 12, as written, is qualified by the term "arbitrary". According to the right as written, you or I can be interfered with if the reasons for doing so are non-arbitrary.) Absolute privacy rights increase freedom from non-legal consequences -- this is a good thing when your social context is horrible (shun him! he's smoking mj!), but more often than not, removing social consequences is a net loss.
Privacy has a nice "liberty narrative" which makes it easy to defend (as you are doing) in the abstract, because it bears a close relationship to freedom (you are, without a doubt, "more free" if you have more control over what you choose to disclose). In practice, people behave best (on balance) when transparency is maximized, and they behave worst when they have absolute privacy and anonymity (see Tor, 4chan, freenet, etc.). In many game-theoretic contexts, "private information" is what leads to sub-optimal overall outcomes that tend to strongly preference the already advantaged.
Privacy rights, therefore, have much to do with the tension between the goals of the many and the goals of the few. The real problems lie not with privacy per se, but with asymmetries in its distribution.
> Things aren't that simple. Certain rights can certainly override others (your right to life overrides my liberty to shoot you)
Certain rights certainly can. But not human rights. That's the whole point.
(btw "liberty to shoot GP" and "ability to buy guns" are not in fact human rights. GP's "right to life", however, is.)