You’re totally right about the government thing, too–there’s no reason to violate *everybody’s* rights just because a few people might need to be regulated in the future. And I’m very similar to you in the sense of following the law but not necessarily wanting to expose all my information everywhere–and I’m REALLY not a private person; I mean, almost everybody in the world could acquire my address, phone number, and all my contact information if they really wanted to. Still, I think that individuals should have the right to make that decision about what information they want to expose to whom.

I think in general the idea that normal people need to be treated identically to criminals is one of the major root ideas that undermines our human rights everywhere in the world.

-Max

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One thing I’ve always heard regarding privacy and encryption is that of mailing a letter in an envelope vs. putting it in on a postcard.

One can argue that someone has something to hide, not mailing it on a postcard. However, we all know this is ridiculous, we just want to keep what is private, private, even if it is just trivial personal correspondence.

The same argument can be made for email, hard drives, etc. The only people that can see the email are folks along the way (mail servers, ISPs, etc.) or people purposely snooping – which is the same as the postcard/envelope example.

Just food for thought. It gets even more complicated when you have sensitive information co-located, and perhaps have a business obligation to keep information sensitive. We all know physical security is everything, but there has to be some way to accomplish things even in a shared environment.

My argument is simple: I don’t want you to know what I don’t want to disclose to you. For that reason, I’m going to use what technical methods I can to prevent you from knowing what I don’t want to disclose. It doesn’t make me a criminal (I like to think I’m a very moral person and don’t break laws, even copyright laws that I don’t agree with), doesn’t mean I do or don’t have something to hide, it just means I want to keep my business to myself.

I believe there is nothing wrong with that. Of course, many government agencies would prefer no one have that attitude or capability. They site things like the need to track down all sorts of bad people, which they couldn’t do without prying into everyone’s privacy.

Sorry, I don’t trust anyone with that sort of access. I don’t trust ME with that access. I don’t think anyone should. The government you like and trust today can easily be replaced tomorrow with another, that’s what I think folks need to keep in mind.

No, I don’t wear a tinfoil hat, but I’m very realistic when it comes to thinking about security and privacy and what it really means.

It’s one reason we had such a lively debate in my school district about children being given consent to leave school campus for doctor visits, without informing parents. Part of the problem is that parents still legally responsible for them even though they were under the assumption that the children were under the care of the school until after school hours. Further, parents have a legal obligation to bring their children for education (home schooling and private school are also options, but not everyone can afford these options).

The district board of trustees were shown in force of numbers that this was not acceptable, and they voted it down (unless a parent specifically signs a paper saying the school has their permission for their child to leave for doctors visits without notifying them).

-Max

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As a person, I don’t have the right (ethical) to transgress against another person. Knifing somebody without their permission is a form of transgression. By going onto public space, I do not make myself public property to be used at the whims of others. No, I still own my physical body. On the other hand, if I were to access a website, unless it was government owned, I would be accessing privately owned data. This data, once on my computer, can do whatever it wants, but if I don’t like what it is doing, I won’t go to that website.

You don’t opt-in to everything just by being at a location. Instead, your actions determines whether you opt-in or not. On the street, you might not opt-in to anything, but you might ask a stranger to knife you in the back (improbable, but not unethical; probably not right under the second definition). When you access a computer, you might not go on the Internet or run programs made by other people (extremely improbably), but you probably will, and when you do so, you have to make the decision on whether or not you allow all that is happening. No “law” should say otherwise. Contracts, on the other hand…

I would say that privacy is a right in the sense of the definition of the word “right”–definition 2 here: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/right

-Max

You could be right that it always involves information, though sometimes I personally want privacy of space for reasons that aren’t information related–that feeling that one “wants to be alone at the moment”. It’s a sort of a scale, I suppose, there, too–I’d feel very much not alone with a person in the room, slightly less “not alone” if there were a camera, etc.

So yeah, everything has a scale, these are just two sides of this particular scale–space and information.

-Max

In doing so, I have found that privacy is not a right, and has to be developed. Furthermore, I have found that when you put a URL into your web browser, you are, in a sense, opting in to anything that site gives you whether you know it or not. It is possible that there could be fraud from another source describing the site, but the site itself would not be at fault; the source would be, similar to if somebody was being fraudulent about non-electronic resources.

In other words, be careful with your actions. You cannot control what others think. If you try, you are by definition, evil.

This is a nitpick on an otherwise very useful and insightful post, but I do feel there’s a real problem with trying to define an absolute distinction between the two types. Just as real situations require subtlety and thought with regard to how privacy should be treated, there’s more subtlety involved than a simple binary distinction between privacy of space vs information, too.

I think the way I think of it is that privacy always regards information, it’s just that sometimes the information is of the form “what I’m doing in this particular space at this particular time, or what I look/sound like doing it”.