MrGrimm wrote: ⤴Sun Dec 09, 2018 10:06 am
BigEasy wrote: ⤴Sat Dec 08, 2018 2:19 pm
Good morning. It is true. And so what?
we have a right to privacy PERIOD,
THAT"S WHAT!!!!!!!!!!!!
But
do we, actually?
What I mean by that is best explained by way of an analogy.
We tend to think of property ownership rights in basic, traditional terms: I buy an object and it is now legally mine and nobody else's. That means I can keep it or sell it or use it or destroy it or store it. I can use it for any task for which it is capable (for example, if it's a shovel, I can use it for dirt, sand, snow, piles of coal, leaves, or whatever) and I have at least a legal, if not an intrinsic, right to do so. However, do you have a right to duplicate it? If the design is basic and generic enough and nobody has either patented or trademarked or copyrighted it, then in theory you could duplicate it (minus any logos, for example) without legal repercussion. Hopefully you appreciate the subtle distinction I'm making: it's not so much that you have the right to duplicate it; you're merely not trampling on anybody else's ownership rights if you do.
However, what of modern technological devices, such as an engine computer? Sure, purchasing it may make the object itself your legal property, but what of the firmware embedded in it? Surely you do not own copyrighted and/or patented code. So, at the end of the day, who actually owns the thing you spent your money on?
Likewise, when it comes to privacy and our self-perceived rights to it, in what context are you speaking? Other than in our own homes or other legitimately private spaces, our "right" to privacy falls away pretty quickly. It disappears even faster when you're talking about something like online mediums. Your computer, in terms of the hardware itself, may well be your private property and therefore your information's private domicile, but consider that, in order to realize the data processing and storage potential of a technological device, software is involved, along with the aforementioned Middleware. Add to that the highly blended reality introduced because of the centrality of the Internet in nearly every aspect of our existence, and consider how much of what you might perceive to be
yours is actually somebody
else's.
