luni, 12 decembrie 2011

Do you consider privacy to be a privilege or right?

According as a dictionary a,,right"is something that is do to a person by legal guarantee”, while a privilege is an “exemption” or “immunity" garanted to a person.
Rights and privileges both give us certain types of protection, but the dynamic involved differs. When I have a “right” to something, I expect the government to see that I get it.. So I have a constitutional right to due process in a criminal trial or in an administrative proceeding dealing with my right to, say, unemployment benefits.
When I have a privilege-an imunity that protects me for being compelled to do something the govermment wants me to do.
The privacy is conceptually more analogous to the privilege against self-incrimination than it is to the right to have due process. Privacy is inherently an oppositional concept; it doesn’t exist in the abstract. When I’m concerned about privacy, I’m concerned about shutting other people out of certain aspects of my life.
As a matter of practice, then, we already treat privacy as a privilege, not a right, and we do that because it makes sense. It makes sense to make the state responsible for providing counsel and other procedural protections to defendants in criminal cases because the state controls the adjudicative process. It would not be “reasonable” to make the state the arbiter of privacy because privacy is not something in which the state has a vested interest; indeed, privacy is in many respects antithetical to the state’s interests since, if nothing else, the limitations imposed by privacy make it more difficult to investigate and prosecute crimes.

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