Duane,

I have not seen an ontology of privacy. There have been some discussions about this issue that might be informative.

First, privacy is not mentioned in the Constitution as a right. It has been argued that it is a derived right from other rights mentioned including "...life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." and "...freedom from search and seizure", (Fourth amendment) but even then, there are limits to this freedom for searches using warrants.

Yes, we do allegedly give up rights with Terms of Agreement. However, there is a professor at Harvard who argues that TOA's are not valid contracts in that they are not arrived at as an agreement between equal parties. I don't think this has been tested in court.

If I had to write an ontology for privacy I would attempt to do it as a reflection of a contractual agreement, in that privacy is something owed to me, either as a citizen or as derived from the Constitution. I don't think it can appear "vero eos et auras" (out of thin air) from living in a democracy. That is, I don't see it as a right imbued by having residence within the borders of the U.S.

While we are at it, I have been working on "roles" and have been considering the term "imbued". It came up during a movie I was watching. The bad guy was wondering "Is this Kaley's room? It seems odd that that the room has 'Kaley' assigned to it." It sounded like he was wondering if a room, a non-agent, can have a role assigned to it. I decided that whatever it was, to be "imbued" is to have others recognize that the room is assigned to a certain person, in this case "Kaley". It clearly comes off as one of Austen's Speech Acts such as christening a ship. It is an assignment that is recognized by a group of people and is logged in a registry of ship names, just as the members of the (Firefly) ship recognizes the room as Kaley's.

Likewise, I think privacy is something that is culturally recognized by groups of people. Even as children, before we have any notion of contracts or law, we recognize that we need privacy. And the courts should recognize this innate need. They already award anonymity to investors who establish corporations, so shouldn't individuals be able to claim this same privilege?

-John Bottoms
FirstStar System
Concord, MA USA


On 1/15/2014 3:13 PM, Kingsley Idehen wrote: