Privasee - unbaked

What is the real problem with the invasion of privacy?

The simplest definition of privacy is: 'The right to be left alone’ [1]
A slightly more useful definition: "..The right to determine the extent to which your thoughts and ideas would be communicated to others." [2]

Where does it come from:
The protection from actual bodily injury was extended to the protection from attempts to do such injury – from the fear of such injury. Thus the action of battery grew from that of assault. Soon qualified protection was available against noises and odors, against dust and smoke, and excessive vibration.[2]

So, the problems with the invasion of privacy:

1. You are not left alone: someone is always bothering you because they know how and where to find you
2. People seem to know intimate details about you: they know what will turn you on; they can at least guess
3. Someone's always watching you: different from #1.
4. People steal your identity and fool the world into thinking they are you
5. People say nasty things about you in public based on private stuff they learned about you somehow.

Before we go ahead and deny these petty human rights and wrongs as nothing other than superficial diversions meant for brain dead cocktail parties...

In a place like India (which is a more realistic representation of human values [3]), there is so much noise, smell, dust, vibration and other juicy assaults on one's senses; they are sometimes loud enough to enter your very soul, it would be extremely difficult to determine if your privacy is being invaded or you are just being treated very nicely.

Now, for the benefit of the sanitized global community,

The denial:

White and Yellow pages have been around for some time now ... people could find you by name, get your address and phone number and call you when they wished.. or even pop you a visit in the middle of the night when you are just getting into your wolf suit.
You could choose to not pick up the phone.. or not open the door.
Today, you can choose to not open those emails about enlargement or boyfriends.
There goes crib #1

On the one hand we have people who like to do a 24/7 live webcast of their boring lives ... and on the
other we have people who bicker about how they want to be left alone... they call it the schizophrenic age... what the hell use is it to call it anything...call it the great bear for all i care.
far from it being logical to have a law that allows people to be left alone, can we humans be left alone to start with?
So much for crib #2

You are being watched on the net, they will tell you. Somebody knows every single place you went to, every little picture you looked at..
In the offline world, it's pretty much the same... just that the record of where you went and what you did is distributed across various people's memories... if they all happened to know each other and they happened to discuss you, your entire path of sleaze would be lit up like a jellyfish.
You are better off not raising crib #3

"Defamation must have a tendency to injure the claimant in his interactions with others – and must subject him to the hatred, ridicule or contempt of his fellow men – conditions which an invasion of privacy does not satisfy." [2]
Privacy has almost nothing to do with defamation.
Crib #4 does not follow from facts. Ignored.

Privacy or the invasion of it really becomes important only if A says something about B and B doesn't like what has been said, although it might be the truth.
If A had said something really nice about B, that should still amount to an invasion of privacy, but in most cases B just loves it, although it might not be the truth
It would be interesting to see Gandhi file a case against someone who called him a mahatma...
as comments about one's atma are pretty personal
Crib #5 is just too shallow


As you walk into a casino, you hope to win, but expect to lose

Outside the casino your life couldn't be too different...
you hope to get away doing weird shit, but you better expect that the karma will catch up with you... in one way or another... starting ... now



[1] Olmstead v. U.S., (1928) 277 US 438; Public Utilities Comm v. Pollack, (1952) 343 US 451.
[2] Brandeis et. al., “The Right to Privacy”, 4 Harvard Law Review 193 (1890).
[3] See next post. :)