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Privacy is dead?

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Have a look at Mike Treder's post titled "Is Privacy Overrated?" here:

We agreed with author, scholar, and transparency advocate David Brin, who asserts that we are not required to choose between freedom and security; that, in fact, history shows us that the most open or "transparent" societies -- those with the least emphasis on secrecy and control -- also are the safest.
I have the impression that law and economics scholars tends to restrict privacy uses for economical purposes, hence, privacy is protected insofar as the total outcome of its protection outweighed its costs of protections. Secondly, privacy shall not be protected if it hinders people to commence beneficial economic transactions. Posner said in his blog:
The particular concern I have with defenders of privacy arises when they argue for legal rights to blanket concealment not of communications, and not of embarrassing facts, but of facts that would be material to the willingness of other persons to transact with the concealer on terms favorable to him.
Posner seemed to defend organizational value of privacy (in terms of trade secret, for example) compared to its individual value. (I must put a note here, that I doubted that protecting privacy in organizations is all good, if they are too much protected, then it can also hamper developments.)

From the human rights approach, privacy is also troublesome. Is privacy a sub-right or a fundamental human rights? I think privacy could be an interrelation between the two. Not all concepts under privacy rights are negative rights.

See my previous discussion on this issue here.