The Right to Privacy is Dead; Long Live the Right To Privacy

-- LuisVilla - 21 Apr 2008

_These are notes and not the final paper; having them in the history of this page will help me revise later._

_Really not sure this is the right tack, either, but I want to explore it._

We don't speak of a 'right to informed discourse'; that would be complex and very difficult to judge- we'd have to consider issues of education, equality of platform, etc. Instead we speak of a simpler, more concrete right to free speech- it's not a right to quality speech, or to be listened to, or anything like that- just the right to speak unimpeded. This is obviously suboptimal in some ways.

The 'right to privacy' has become bogged down in the same complex mire as a hypothetical 'right to informed discourse'- we 'know it when we see it', but it is complex enough that we have a hard time articulating and protecting it. I argue here that this suggests that we should stop arguing for "privacy" and instead should argue for concrete goals which may be easier to achieve, easier to tie to the 18th Century language we have at hand, and which (eventually) could be used to reconstruct a vision of privacy aligned with and protectable by (admittedly coarser) tools.