Ethics

Should people have an expectation of privacy with regards to things they do in public? For instance, do I have the right to expect that conversations I hold in public places are not recorded, or that my shopping trips are not be tracked then and posted online?

Comments

Good questions. But it's hard to imagine that we have (or 'should' have) rights as specific as these except in the sense that we reach some sort of societal consensus about them -- so I might rephrase the question as 'would we have a better society overall if we granted such rights than if we don't?' Since (in my initial thoughts on answering the question so phrased) we have almost no way of enforcing such rules, and we now live in the age of everyone recording everything, and since there are at least some benefits to being in this age, and since younger folks in particular are growing up without anything like the expectation of privacy older folks once were used to, we may as well give up on such rights -- and reserve the right to privacy to private places (where it's already hard enough to enforce, given e veryone's interconnectedness etc.) ....

hope that's useful!

ap

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