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Re: There's no general right to privacy -- get over it, from Netly (fwd)
> > likes to say "Privacy is not an absolute right, but a
> > fundamental right." But in truth, privacy is not a
> > right but a preference: Some people want more of it
> > than others.
>
> A right is not a question of popularity or amplitude, it is a question of
> existance. It is or it isn't. Some people want more guns than others
> (obvious even to you) so you seriously hold that there is no fundamental
> Constitutional right to own firearms? Or speech, we don't all want to use it
> to the same amount, we therefore don't have a right to free speech? Or (oh
> my god!) crypto, we don't all want to use it to the same degree therefore we
> don't have a right to use crypto?
No, privacy is not a right, it is most definitely a preference. If you
allow information to become freely available then there is no way to put
the genie back in the bottle, once information is available it requires
restrictions on freedom of speech to stop the spread of that information,
and restrictions on freedom of private equiment to prevent its storage
and use.
This is all based on freedom of speech, there is no such thing as
"private information" in the sense of it being somehow wrong for
unauthorised people to posess that information, it is up to you how much
privacy you prefer and correspondingly how much effort you put into
preventing information from becoming available.
Datacomms Technologies data security
Paul Bradley, [email protected]
[email protected], [email protected]
Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/
Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85
"Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"