Nelson Mandela's "Ubuntu" is essentially human-ness, those traits that distinguish us from animals. One of these certainly must be privacy, derived from common performance of many bodily functions (including digitized communications). Lower order animals we say have no such expectations do they and we certainly accord animals none. These 'rights' are not itemized in our Constitution -- it would make the 2nd amendment quite banal. Do we have a right to marry another? It's not in the Constitution, but surely we can agree that we have that right. So the mere fact it is not spelled out "legally" is hardly an impediment to the fact of its ontological existence -- this is true of any non-substantial concept.

It may be Lawrence Lessig to whom you referred. Anyway, it is conceivable to me the 'privacy' of digital communications is addressable under copyright law, for I own all that I say. Which brings to mind an ancient design for what is now HTTP that identified ownership in vitro of each bit of digitized communications.
/john

[
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:

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