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Right to Privacy a Fundamental Right, Says Indian Supreme Court

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Re: Right to Privacy a Fundamental Right, Says Indian Supreme Court

#181
Privacy : You have a right to try to keep things as private as you want. You should not be prosecuted for merely trying to keep things private.

Your responsibility :

1. Don't share things that you want to keep private.

2. Carefully weigh the trade offs when you agree to share things about you. There is no retroactive privacy on things that you yourself shared.

3. You can attempt to retract what was shared about you, but you can't hold society responsible for successful retraction of that piece of information, from media or minds. You can add addendum e.g. an apology from someone, you can claim damages, but we can't rewind time.

Government responsibility:

1. Don't criminalize people trying to keep things private. This would be similar USA Fifth Amendment, do not force people to share what they don't want to share. Government can ask "What crimes you committed in the privacy of your home?", but it can't force people to answer that question or punish for not answering it.

2. You can't plead fifth and deny proving your identity when you want to take food stamps from government, or when you get unearned tax credit. Just like in any transaction, Government can ask you to prove who you are and may demand increasing levels of proof depending on the transaction. Your choice would be to not participate in such transactions, in certain situations you implicitly give permission to Government to demand proof of identity from you, e.g. if you request a loan to dig a well or subsidy to buy fertilizer or collecting unemployment benefit. Security of exchange of money from government to people is Government's responsibility and it may demand increasing levels of identification depending on the nature of the transaction, as deemed appropriate by abused observed or potential for abuse. In places with high corruption rates, strong identification would be required and would be appropriate. I don't think people would be OK if someone collects their pension using just name, address and birth date, and government throwing hands in the air accusing you for not protecting your name, address and birth date.

What you can't do:

1. Make the world forget what it already knows. Can't ask Google to delete a piece of information about you from entire internet, once you yourself post it on Blogger. You can delete the post from Google, you can delete your account, but you must realize that once something is not private, you have no control over who has seen it and how many formats/copies of that information got created.

2. Get into a contract to drop certain privacy and then deny fulfilling the contract because of privacy rights. E.g. a model can't say that she won't show her face on a fashion ramp because of privacy after taking payment. A storybook author can't say that she won't share her book with publisher because of privacy after taking payment.

3. Make a demand that a private entity, on its private premises, can't have monitoring equipment. A store may decide to have cameras at the self checkout lanes, and it may deny self checkout to folks with full face covering. Your choice would be to not shop at such places, you can't use law to shut down the business's ability to monitor their private premise as they wish. An employer may make alcohol breath analyzer test required e.g. for a surgeon before surgery, a pilot, air traffic control at the start of the duty, or a long distance train driver. The employees in this case can't claim privacy rights to deny such tests.

4. When you are in public place e.g. a sidewalk, you are participating in a public endeavor that comes with you dropping the privacy protection e.g. compared to what you would get in your bedroom. The rays of light that bounce off of you or your belonging are fair game to be captured. Photographers do not need to take your permission to capture rays of light that are travelling in their direction when they stand on a public place or a private place they own or a private place where the owner has given them permission to capture the rays. Those photographs can only be used for personal consumption or for non-profit activities e.g. an investigation, news reporting. Any commercial use of the photo e.g. in an product advertisement, would require release agreement from the person in the photo.

I think Strong Privacy and Strong Identification both are required, for some things they are mutually exclusive, in some parts you trade one for another. Authentication/Authorization/Encryption/Non-Repudiation is needed to deliver these rights.

Consider this, if privacy laws are absolute in every aspect of life then you can't have antitrust laws that stop competitors from fixing prices or agreeing to anti-competitive behavior. If privacy laws are absolute then smartphone apps that capture photo/video of an crime unfolding won't be allowed due to privacy concerns of the criminal. If you can keep something private (lock the door to your room, your safe deposit box), no one will force you to expose it, but one can't demand privacy in situations that naturally expose information to others, unless you explicitly set the expectation of privacy (attorney-client, doctor-patient, a service provider) as part of a contract. Government may make laws to cover most common situations e.g. your real estate agent sharing your budget with the seller of the property, your medical records etc.

Privacy law is natural. What I draw and erase on a doodle board in the privacy of my home is my business, you can't force me to divulge it. What I say in my head to myself is my business, there is no thought crime. What I sing when on a trail is my business, no one can force me to say which song I sung. When government or corporation tries to invade the natural privacy, it should be stopped. In that regard, privacy is a fundamental right. But, privacy can't be claimed to hide criminal record from your neighbors or employers.

More of me trying to sort it out in my own head.

Re: Right to Privacy a Fundamental Right, Says Indian Supreme Court

#182
post #27
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in the U.S., that is not the real issue. Nobody disputes that the Bill of Rights is not exhaustive. But just because the Bill of Rights is not exhaustive does not mean that the Supreme Court may make up new rights over time. Legal conservatives in the U.S. adhere to the idea that for a right to exist, society must have recognized it as a right at the time the Constitution was written. In other words, you do…

> Nobody disputes that the Bill of Rights is not exhaustive. Unfortunately, that is not true. Robert Bork famously disputed it, even going so far as to deny the validity of the ninth amendment. Many conservatives support Bork's position today, e.g.: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/336142/judge-borks-ink... They do this because it's a logical pre-requisite for overturning Roe v. Wade.

Bork didn't say that the Bill of Rights is exclusive, he said the 9th amendment is unclear about what other rights it is talking about: "We don’t have much evidence about what the Founders meant; they may have been trying to protect state-constitutional rights; we have good reason to doubt they meant the amendment to magnify the power of the courts to overturn laws."

> They do this because it's a logical pre-requisite for overturning Roe v. Wade.

I don't want to see Roe overturned, but I think the entire Griswold line is nonsensical. We have a perfectly good legal foundation for protecting abortion, which doesn't rely on conjuring rights out of "penumbras": https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/the-forgo....

Re: Right to Privacy a Fundamental Right, Says Indian Supreme Court

#183
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody disputes that the Bill of Rights is not exhaustive. Unfortunately, that is not true. Robert Bork famously disputed it, even going so far as to deny the validity of the ninth amendment. Many conservatives support Bork's position today, e.g.: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/336142/judge-borks-ink... They do this because it's a logical pre-requisite for overturning Roe v. Wade.

Bork didn't say that the Bill of Rights is exclusive, he said the 9th amendment is unclear about what other rights it is talking about: "We don’t have much evidence about what the Founders meant; they may have been trying to protect state-constitutional rights; we have good reason to doubt they meant the amendment to magnify the power of the courts to overturn laws." > They do this because it's a logical pre-requisit…

> We have a perfectly good legal foundation for protecting abortion

No, unfortunately, we don't. A sound logical argument is not the same thing as a good legal foundation. Ginsberg's equal-protection argument has never been formally accepted -- or even considered -- by the court. And even on purely logical grounds it is fraught with peril because it assumes that a fetus is not a person. If a fetus is a person then they too are entitled to equal protection.

Personally I'd rather cast my lot with the right to privacy and the ninth amendment. I value that right far beyond its ability to protect reproductive freedom.

Re: Right to Privacy a Fundamental Right, Says Indian Supreme Court

#184
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The right to free speech, conscience, affiliation , assembly and other political freedoms mean we need to tolerate and protect the proverbial nazis’ rights to try and spread their politics. Bitter pill for anyone scared of a proverbial nazi takeover. Nazi's are an easy target. The problem starts when things are not as clean cut -- when actual politics are involved, as opposed to crude stuff like "exterminate all je…

They absolutely should be able to express their ideas, as long as they do so in a peaceful and non-threatening way.

What about burning or hanging someone in effigy? That's pretty threatening, but doesn't actively display intent.

Re: Right to Privacy a Fundamental Right, Says Indian Supreme Court

#185
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we really to the point where Nazi ideologies are spreading like wildfire, to the point that their "intolerance" will be seized by our "tolerance?" To me it seems like the opposite is happening. Nazi ideologies are marginalized and meaningless, yet propped up like some huge threat to us... like they might take over. And this is being used as justification for limiting free speech, in a hyper-politically correct so…

"Are we really to the point where Nazi ideologies are spreading like wildfire, to the point that their "intolerance" will be seized by our "tolerance?"" You're thinking about it a little backwards - here's a fascinating example of the paradox of tolerance: Proposition 8, in California (2008)[1] was a ballet initiative that proposed that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California". P…

I don't understand how that is the paradox of intolerance.

Re: Right to Privacy a Fundamental Right, Says Indian Supreme Court

#186
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They do this because it's a logical pre-requisite for overturning Roe v. Wade. It's really not, though, it's just a convenience; one could easily find grounds tomreverse Roe.and even the subsequent abortion decisions without just ignoring the Ninth Amendment. The real reason is that the Ninth Amendment is irreconcilable with the narrow mode of textualism that I personally think of as “four corners” or “sola scriptu…

> one could easily find grounds to reverse Roe No, it's not so easy. Conservatives have been trying unsuccessfully to overturn it for 44 years. (Actually, that's not quite true. The effort to overturn Roe didn't actually start until 1979, fully six years after Roe was decided on a 7-2 vote. And the truth is they don't really want to overturn it. They really just want to use it as a wedge issue.)

> No, it's not so easy.

It's easy to construct a coherent interpretation of the Constitution that invalidates Roe without nuking the Ninth Amendment (the thing with fuzzy penumbras and unenumerated rights is that it is very easy to come up with equally coherent interpretations of what their scope is.)

It may be hard politically to get a Court majority appointed and confirms that agrees with eliminating abortion rights whatever the logical basis (or even without consensus on the basis; court decisions where there is a majority on the result but not the rationale are possible, so you don't need a unifying rationale to get a result.) But that's a different issue and nuke-the-Ninth types don't help that.

Re: Right to Privacy a Fundamental Right, Says Indian Supreme Court

#187
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one could easily find grounds to reverse Roe No, it's not so easy. Conservatives have been trying unsuccessfully to overturn it for 44 years. (Actually, that's not quite true. The effort to overturn Roe didn't actually start until 1979, fully six years after Roe was decided on a 7-2 vote. And the truth is they don't really want to overturn it. They really just want to use it as a wedge issue.)

> No, it's not so easy. It's easy to construct a coherent interpretation of the Constitution that invalidates Roe without nuking the Ninth Amendment (the thing with fuzzy penumbras and unenumerated rights is that it is very easy to come up with equally coherent interpretations of what their scope is.) It may be hard politically to get a Court majority appointed and confirms that agrees with eliminating abortion right…

> It's easy to construct a coherent interpretation of the Constitution that invalidates Roe without nuking the Ninth Amendment

Really? What is it?

Re: Right to Privacy a Fundamental Right, Says Indian Supreme Court

#188
post #74

A lot of conversations about expanding rights, end up with a distinction between positive and negative rights. A right to water, is different to free speech. For everyone to have a right to water, someone needs to provide the water or be held accountable for not providing it. A default, state culprit needs to be designated. Privacy though, privacy is like speech or equality before the law or presumption of innocence.…

> A lot of conversations about expanding rights, end up with a distinction between positive and negative rights. Correct. Right to a fair trail is also a positive right. To uphold it, the state must pay for a lawyer if you don't have one, the state must pay for enough judges (& associated costs) to ensure your trail isn't delayed ("Justice delayed is justice denied" and all that). > The right to free speech, conscien…

[deleted]

Re: Right to Privacy a Fundamental Right, Says Indian Supreme Court

#189

A lot of conversations about expanding rights, end up with a distinction between positive and negative rights. A right to water, is different to free speech. For everyone to have a right to water, someone needs to provide the water or be held accountable for not providing it. A default, state culprit needs to be designated. Privacy though, privacy is like speech or equality before the law or presumption of innocence.…

> The right to free speech, conscience, affiliation , assembly and other political freedoms mean we need to tolerate and protect the proverbial nazis’ rights to try and spread their politics. I'm not convinced I know how I feel about this. I want to believe this is a false dichotomy. Can we have limits in polite society ? I keep thinking of the paradox of tolerance [1], which states, in brief, that if a society is to…

This is intellectually dishonest. I can think of plenty of equally as poisonous ideologies as Nazism. Communism devoured millions of its own citizens. Should we ban them because their ideas are toxic? No! The truth should come through and I'd have the opportunity to refute them than to cover my ears to them.

Re: Right to Privacy a Fundamental Right, Says Indian Supreme Court

#190
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a bank account from a non-government entity is not a benefit provided by the government. Yet, the government has issued notifications to link all bank accounts with Aadhaar or have the accounts indefinitely suspended. Having a mobile number from a non-government entity is not a benefit provided by the government. Yet, the government's Department of Telecom (DoT) issued a notification asking all telcos to verif…

Is this like the US and the SSN, which was originally only meant for social security, but is now used for anything and everything and many systems require it if you want to do business at all, even though the business isn't related to social security at all?

It's slightly similar, but a lot more dangerous since it has biometrics attached to it (ten fingerprints and two iris scans). There are no data privacy laws in India, and if someone faces misuse or loss or harm caused by this, they cannot even sue the other party because the legal act (Aadhaar Act) gives the right to sue only to the issuing authority (UIDAI). And UIDAI has a very poor track record of punishing the criminals and instead goes after those who point to flaws in the system.
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