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Niklas
2018-09-06 17:26

Is privacy a right?

Image 1. Click to open in original size.

Government representatives of the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia recently met to discuss domestic security issues. Afterwards they released a statement saying, among other things, that:

”It is an established principle that appropriate government authorities should be able to seek access to otherwise private information when a court or independent authority has authorized such access based on established legal standards. The same principles have long permitted government authorities to search homes, vehicles, and personal effects with valid legal authority."

In short, they want to be able to force companies to provide government back doors to for instance chat services and social networks. The reason is that they want to get access to information of criminals.

What do you think? Should anyone, you and criminals, be able to have private conversations knowing that no one can eavesdrop? Or should governments always have a right and a way to access any information if it can Help them catch more criminals?

» Privacy not absolute: US among consortium of nations calling for encryption back doors

(Photo by JoelValve at Unsplash)


Best regards, Niklas 🎈

Annons:
Evelina
2018-09-14 11:44
#1

I think governments should have the right to have access to private conversations if there is a justified reason. For example, the police cannot enter your home until they have a warrant. 

But, on the other hand, a part of me has to disagree. This is not because I want to defend criminal activity, it is just that what the government defines as criminal activity can be hard to distinguish when it comes to whistleblowers. Right now, it is a huge problem in the US that we have whistleblowers who have outed to the public governmental activities that are unjust. These whistleblowers are getting charged with crimes and being thrown in jail. If the government is able to track conversations (and they do) that whistleblowers have said, or are going to say, it can be used against them when they are going to court (which, in fact, has already happened as in the case of Chelsea Manning).

Niklas
2018-09-14 12:31
#2

Justified reason. Who should decide what that is? And what if they hide “justified reason” behind ”suspected threat of terror”, then no one can find out what the real reason is. Is that okay? And is it worth the risk of exposing all citizens private data to have a government backdoor that hackers can exploit? Who should be responsible for auditing the governments use of ”justified reasons”? Do you trust the government not to abuse a system like that?


Best regards, Niklas 🎈

Evelina
2018-09-14 12:37
#3

I do not trust the government 😲😂 hope they don’t use this against me, lol. I feel like, as of now, my answer is no the government shouldn’t have access through back doors. But I hope that can change if we can find a way to protect citizens from potential privacy infringement, while also catching criminal activity, such as abusers of child pornography, sex traffickers, terrorists, etc.

Evelina
2018-09-14 12:41
#4

It goes back to the grand moral theories of Bentham and Kant, do you sacrifice individual privacy for the greater ‘good’ of society or do you hold onto the principal that privacy is a human right.

Niklas
2018-09-14 14:00
#5

So far I think that privacy trumps greater good. Freedom is more important than most other things.


Best regards, Niklas 🎈

Evelina
2018-09-14 14:11
#6

Privacy was one of the issues my bachelor's thesis was concerned with. I remember reading articles (irrelevant to my paper but I still found them interesting) about the notion of privacy being perceived as a human right. The articles discussed how privacy as a human right has only been conceived as so in contemporary years. Privacy was never something individuals had back in the day when everyone lived in small villages. In those villages, everyone knew everything about each other because the town was so small and everyone gossiped. I think this is really interesting, that today most people might say that privacy is a right, and yet, we are so willing to share our data with corporations on a daily, if not hourly, basis. 

Why do you feel privacy is linked to freedom? Not that I disagree, I am just curious.

Annons:
Niklas
2018-09-14 16:50
#7

Aah, I wrote a long answer and lost it when I was almost done! I think there are many kinds of privacy. Privacy of communication (speech, email, phone, mail), privacy of thoughts, privacy of belongings, privacy of person. To a degree I agree that privacy hasn't always been a given. If you lived in a small village or on a farm, what you said or did may not have been very private. On the other hand, if you were someone who could write, I think you could write something on a piece of paper, hide it, and be pretty certain that it stayed private. Back then the need for thinking of or discussing privacy probably was quite small. You knew when you had privacy and not. For someone to breach your privacy, they had to be physically present. It didn't just happen without your knowledge. In Sweden, perhaps other countries too, we have a law called mail screcy. It means that the intended recipient of a letter or phone message has the right to not have someone else open it before them. The punishment for breaking this law is up to two years in prison. I don't see any reason why this law shouldn't be applicable to other types of communication as well. And about leaving your information with companies, that is something you can decide to do, but then you aren't likely to leave your darkest secrets with them, unless, of course, you really trust them with your privacy. I could leave some information with Google without worrying, but I would not trust them with any information. I would trust Apple with more sensitive information, but perhaps not everything. If you can have things that are private, it gives you the freedom to record and save any thoughts, ideas, testimony, fantasies and other things you want. That is almost as important as the right to your own thoughts and at least equally important as free speech.


Best regards, Niklas 🎈

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