Comment by leot

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.