Right to Privacy a Fundamental Right, Says Indian Supreme Court • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by wojt_eu » Fri, Aug 25, 2017, 9:27 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #93

dalbasal wrote: post #54

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. 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…

> 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 jews" and "blacks are inferior", etc that Nazi's might say.

It wasn't so clean cut back in Germany in the 30s either, there was always some other rhetoric: being "stabbed in the back" in WW1 by internal forces, using emergency powers to deal with effects of Great Depression and threat of Marxism.

[Update]

I encourage watching snippets of Hitler's speeches (with translations): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnpTWKKWQ1o. Strip away swastikas and heils and these could be used by populist politicians today.

Even if we succeed in prosecuting hate speech there will still be plenty room for fanatics to come to power.

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

#212

Post by noufalibrahim » Fri, Aug 25, 2017, 11:23 AM UTC

matt4077 wrote: post #115

noufalibrahim wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is tricky. I think a workable solution is to create zones where free speech is unrestricted and where new ideas can be incubated. They themselves would have some restrictions (e.g. you can't physically hurt the person you lost a debate to) but would, by and large, be free speech zones. The idea was described in this speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJktQiZRa5A The rest of society can have different rules w…

Yeah, that's an incredibly stupid idea–and I say that as a big fan of reasonable limits on free speech. Creating "free speech zones" seems like a surefire way to start telling everyone to "take it to the free speech zone" and stop annoying "normal people" with your ideas. It's like the wet dream of these people that have started calling citizens consumers, even in a political context, and advocate the criminal prosec…

That makes sense. It's not something I'd considered. However, this is not exactly what I had in mind. My thought was that society should have, as you've put it, "reasonable limits on free speech" but these zones should be "free speech absolutist" places. So the scale is from absolutist in the zones to regular in normal society rather than normal in the zones and restricted in normal society. Whether the former will collapse into the latter and how to prevent that are serious problems though.

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

#213

Post by lisper » Fri, Aug 25, 2017, 3:18 PM UTC

akvadrako wrote: post #210

lisper wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but I thought we were talking about legal arguments here. If you're going to maintain the illusion of the legitimacy of the court you have to at least dress the rationale up as something more convincing than, "We're overturning Roe because we were appointed by Republicans."

That's true but easier than arguing the previous precedents are wrong. Or so wrong, it would override the weight of them being a precedent. The idea that the right to privacy implies the right to perform abortion seems like the weakest point to me. That argument only seems plausible if the right to privacy implies we can do anything to ourselves in private. That's a ridiculous amount of power for a right which isn't…

> That argument only seems plausible if the right to privacy implies we can do anything to ourselves in private.

Is that not the case?

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

#214

Post by 659087 » Sat, Aug 26, 2017, 3:49 PM UTC

whack wrote: post #139

" The petitioners, former Karnataka high court judge Justice K.S. Puttaswamy and others, had contended that the biometric data and iris scan that was being collected for issuing Aadhaar cards violated the citizen’s fundamental right to privacy" I find the above interpretation of privacy troubling. In order for the government to effectively distribute social services to the needy, cutting out corrupt/inefficient middl…

This sounds similar to the arguments Facebook/Zuckerberg were making when "internet".org got the boot from India.

"What about the poor people??"

What they really meant was: "We shouldn't allow poor people to escape our surveillance"

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

#215

Post by wtmt » Mon, Aug 28, 2017, 5:11 AM UTC

srean wrote: post #192

wtmt wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read only a few parts of the judgment, but it reads like poetry while at the same time being crisp and powerful! Even when the hearings were on, there were many references and discussions that showed the broad scope of accepting and considering jurisprudence from elsewhere and seeing what would benefit people. That this was an unanimous verdict makes it even better. I was apprehensive until today morning, and af…

Sorry that someone down voted you. I used to get puzzled by such behavior, now no more. I just upvotes it back to compensate, if only partially. Lot of partisan voting going on here

Thanks. I'm kinda used to that on HN since many people who read my comments seem to be absolutely pro-Aadhaar/pro-government and don't seem to like any critique of the system and how it's putting people in danger (existentially and otherwise).