Quote:
Originally Posted by campbellcj
As Art said, everything on the Internet is visible to somebody. If you want privacy, go off grid and move to a shack in the back country.
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That is the often-repeated rationale, which I believe is incorrect.
To counter with an equally-cliche one, since "being in public doesn't deserve a reasonable expectation of privacy", would it be ok if someone parked across the street and followed your children to school, taking pictures through the open air, identifying their friends, who they associate with, where they go and when, and then following them back to your driveway, week after week...?
No?
That's exactly what databases do.
Another counter-argument analogy would be a business contract. When I go on the internet, I willfully engage in a temporary contract with "x" website(let's say japaneseschoolgirllesbians dotcom) to receive pictures and data. I didn't contract with a seperate company, nor was I even provided the knowledge that a third party website was involved. I certainly didn't give permission to those third parties to monitor and record my browsing history.
You might even consider my web browsing to be intellectual property, and so monitoring it would be
theft! Viewing other "individuals" media without consent involves the FBI and half a million per incident in damages.
Why doesn't the general public have the same rights?