Michael Nielsen and others on privacy
Why does privacy matter? What are the best principled arguments for it? Where to set the boundary [i.e., when is it best to require that certain actions be more broadly known]?
— Michael Nielsen (@michael_nielsen) October 3, 2024
My own answer to this bundle of questions isn't very good. I've read a few classic books, papers,…
It's tempting to give purely consequence-based arguments (in terms of forestalled knowledge and invention and life experience and so on). But while I agree, somehow that kind of argument seems too small. Some sort of right to privacy seems to create a fundamentally different…
— Michael Nielsen (@michael_nielsen) October 3, 2024
My favorite defense of privacy rights is that in order to have other rights such as freedom of opinion, you need a private domain where you can explore your options without being judged by others.
— Anders Sandberg (@anderssandberg) October 3, 2024
(related to surveillance and power) the freedom to explore a diversity of behaviors increases the total resilience of a system. If the option exists to centrally surveil/control behavior, you get more homogenization / monocrop effect and more potential for catastrophic failure.
— Gordon (@gordonbrander) October 3, 2024
An interesting framing: https://t.co/lEEjgw9vOt
— Michael Nielsen (@michael_nielsen) October 3, 2024
E. O. Wilson has pointed to human experience of shame and guilt as consequences of our evolutionary origins as a social species. It's interesting then to enshrine (limited) protection against that shame and guilt in…
Interesting to think of privacy as an extension of Madison's separation of powers. Madison was aimed at powerful institutions; privacy gives a kind of fundamental power and insulation of individuals against institutions
— Michael Nielsen (@michael_nielsen) October 3, 2024
Put another way: privacy encourages us individually to go to 11. And it's really valuable to have space for that: https://t.co/bJHf4j2xQ3
— Michael Nielsen (@michael_nielsen) October 3, 2024
Interesting to realize how many of these arguments would still be largely true if we only had a right to privacy 12 hours a day
(Connected…
Another argument: the right to privacy protects the power of individuals to act against corruption of the surveilling power. For that reason, we'd expect that degree of corruption to be [very roughly] inverse to the privacy of individuals. In that sense, a strong right to…
— Michael Nielsen (@michael_nielsen) October 3, 2024
Quote privacy surveillance governance liberalism