“The right to be let alone
is indeed
the beginning of all Freedom”
Justice William O. Douglas
One the many curiosities about privacy is that there is no written record of old laws left, a fact that could be wrongly interpreted as if it were some improper outgrowth of modern times and not one of the fundamental human rights. This confusion is easily solved when it’s remarked that it was anything but the proliferation of modern mass media, by the late 19th century, that actually propelled the claim for its legal recognition, a quest of very unsuccessful results: that is, the need for privacy is one of many technological wrongs, always increasing with new media-related technologies.
As evidence, it was the visionary paper “The Right to Privacy” by Justice Louis D. Brandeis and Samuel D. Warren published at the Harvard Law Review in 1890 that started the doctrine of the invasion of privacy and mostly settled its current definition: unsurprisingly, it was written as a reaction to a new technology, the photographic camera.
In modern times, the ever-falling costs of computer storage and sensors allow the affordable recording of the full life of an human being, as the experiment MyLifeBits@Microsoft Research did show: but in this case, every piece of information is registered under informed consent and it‘s not as correlated with the information of other people as those found in social-network databases. Its implications are of a more socio-psychological significance, as it strives to redefine human memory, so frail and self-deceiving.
The other side of the coin emerges whenever the tons of unknowingly collected data are used with malicious intents, as shown in the following documentary, Erasing David: escaping from the past has gotten as difficult as escaping from the piles of accumulated data by both governments and private companies.
Anonymity, as a good, is getting scarcer by the moment, and as such, much more pricier to achieve. [amazon_link id=“1599219778” target=“_blank” ]Disappearing, vanishing without a trace[/amazon_link], is the luxury item of our times.