Privacy online isn’t a right: it’s a condition for other rights

[The Straight Story]

Privacy online isn’t a right: it’s a condition for other rights

Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – “Our definition of privacy is fast-evolving right now and we don’t control it,” says Olivier Glassey, from the University of Lausanne. But don’t panic.

“I believe privacy is gone for good,” argues Christian Heller, a self-described “futurist” who relishes taking the debate a step further. Heller likes to remind his listeners that privacy was not a common notion in the Middle Ages, when people lived in small, tightly interwoven communities.

...

Teenagers understand privacy and they have their own definition, says Glassey, but a dilemma as the Facebook generation grows up and their elders catch up with them, is how to ensure forgetfulness. “One of the main challenges will be the long-term memory of privacy,” he points out.
christian_heller

People use social networks like Facebook to recreate their lives, to record their biographies, and this role of social networking has not yet been sufficiently studied. “We need to build in social forgiveness.” Criminals but also the rest of us, who routinely commit small sins that we want to forget, and we want others to forget, should be allowed to fade away, but how do we do that digitally?

Heller reminded his audience that we tend to forget: the 20th century was a time when privacy replaced a more openly shared, more public life, and the shift has not always a positive thing: privacy can also mean loneliness and shame.

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[DJ13]

1. I think the location of the PC you're online with needs to be considered

If you're posting on a WiFi at a public place you have no real privacy expectation.

But if you're posting from your home you should have the right to privacy, even online.

[kenny blankenship]

2. "privacy was not a common notion in the Middle Ages,"

Yes, let's go all the way back to the Middle Ages! I'll be King. I'll need a few of you to be Dukes, Earls and Counts and so forth. Just a few; your younger or more feeble minded brothers can become clerics in the Church. Your female relatives will be traded and bartered for land and allegiance. The rest of you will be peasants tied to the land with no rights at all that the upper 10% have to respect. True, you won't have any privacy and the titled minority will be able to take all the fruits of your labor leaving you only what they don't require/want, and they can have sex with your wife on your wedding night, and probably rape your daughters at will, but doesn't it sound like fun? Who needs privacy in "tight, interwoven communities?" When the nobility isn't directly bossing you around, relieving you of responsibility for your actions since you have no freedom, the Church will be telling you how to behave in every particular and demanding the keys to your conscience. No keeping secrets from God! No privacy for the little people means they can all get absolution at the end of their short, freedom-free lives. Oh, it will be grand -no much better than grand, it will be splendid!