Best 310 quotes in «privacy quotes» category

There are many ways to honor America. This book is mine. I have completed this journey of self-education in the belief that the most terrifying possibility since 9/11 has not been terrorism--as frightening as that is--but the prospect that Americans will give up their rights in pursuing the chimera of security.

There are no secrets on the Internet

There are skeletons in everyone's closet, things no one ever wants the world to discover.

There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.

There is a certain delightful sort of hope which the introvert can receive only by having company over...the hope that they will leave soon.

[T]here is both an intrinsic and instrumental value to privacy. Intrinsically, privacy is precious to the extent that it is a component of a liberty. Part of citizenship in a free society is the expectation that one's personal affairs and physical person are inviolable so long as one remains within the law. A robust concept of freedom includes the freedom from constant and intrusive government surveillance of one's life. From this perspective, Fourth Amendment violations are objectionable for the simple fact that the government is doing something it has no licence to do–that is, invading the privacy of a law-abiding citizen by monitoring her daily activities and laying hands on her person without any evidence of wrongdoing. Privacy is also instrumental in nature. This aspect of the right highlights the pernicious effects, rather than the inherent illegitimacy, of intrusive, suspicionless surveillance. For example, encroachments on individual privacy undermine democratic institutions by chilling free speech. When citizens–especially those espousing unpopular viewpoints–are aware that the intimate details of their personal lives are pervasively monitored by government, or even that they could be singled out for discriminatory treatment by government officials as a result of their First Amendment expressive activities, they are less likely to freely express their dissident views.

There is no denying that Snowden's dramatic disclosures, despite the damage they did to U.S. intelligence, accomplished a salutary service in alerting both the public and the government to the potential danger of a surveillance leviathan." (p.299)

There is no transparency, Marus. It can’t exist. Surveillance doesn’t go both ways. There are those who watch, and those who are watched; the powerful, and the powerless.

There is something about that burning of all those letters that gives me pause: why should everything be made clear and be brought into the light? Why keep things, archive your intimacies? Why not let thirty years of shared conversation go spiralling in ash up into the air of Tunbridge Wells? Just because you have it does not mean you have to pass it on. Losing things can something gain you a space in which to live.

There's something much worse than being ignored-not being ignored.

There's something really liberating about having some corner of your life that's yours, that no one gets to see except you. It's a little like nudity or taking a dump. Everyone gets naked every once in a while. Everyone has to squat on the toilet. There's nothing shameful, deviant or weird about either of them.

The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom." [Public Utilities Commission v. Pollak, 343 U.S. 451, 467 (1952) (dissenting)]

These examples and many others demonstrate an alarming trend whereby the privacy and dignity of our citizens is being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of man's life at will." [Osborn v. United States, 385 U.S. 323, 343 (1966) (dissenting)]

The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization. These transformations have come about silently, because those who know what is going on work in the global surveillance industry and have no incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there. While many writers have considered what the internet means for global civilization, they are wrong. They are wrong because they do not have the sense of perspective that direct experience brings. They are wrong because they have never met the enemy.

The sleeper turns his back on everyone.

The spying upon others' privacy, exemplifies and defines itself, the untrustworthy, and unethical way and action.

The truth is like sunlight: It causes cancer.

The Violation of your own Privacy isn't Authenticity

This should be one of the basic attitudes—not to think about what the other is doing. That is his life. If he decides to live it that way, that is his business. Who are you even to have an opinion about it? Even to have an opinion means that you are ready to interfere, you have already interfered.

This place does not feel like my country. It feels like countries I have read about where things are very bad. It feels, in fact, like exactly the kind of thing we were protesting against, but we thought it was elsewhere. It is not heartening to find that it has come to us.

We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government." [Osborn v. United States, 385 U.S. 323, 341 (1966) (dissenting)]

Two things a wise man never discloses to the public; his money and his women.

Very unfair to a new bride to ask to adjust to in-laws. Married people deserve privacy and freedom to set up their homes & life as they like.

We are living in a generation where people ‘in love’ are free to touch each other’s private parts but are not allowed to touch each other’s phones because they are private.

Today, we are not just inmates or victims in a foreign-controlled digital panoptic. Originally, the Panoptikum was a prison-like building designed by Jeremy Bentham. The prisoners in the outer ring are guarded by a central surveillance tower. In the digital panoptic, we are not just caught. We are ourselves perpetrators. We are actively involved in the digital panopticon. We even entertain it by cableing ourselves to the body like the millions of quantified self-movements and voluntarily putting our body-related data into the web. The new rule does not silence us. Rather, she is constantly calling on us to communicate, to share, to communicate our opinions, needs, wishes and preferences, to tell our lives.

Transparency means to dedicate our thoughts and efforts to non privacy rules and not to defend negative intelligence ideas or surveillance programs.

Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren't just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determining our futures.

Very private people have mastered the art of telling you little about themselves but doing it in such a way you think you know a lot.

We have learned about some people from their social media feeds way more than their families have learned from years of living with them.

What he must have suffered, in his lovely English privacy.

What do I believe? In the private life, in holding up culture, in music, Shakespeare, old buildings…

What man art thou that, thus bescreened in night, So stumblest on my counsel? *Who are you? Why do you hide in the darkness and listen to my private thoughts?*

When privacy is criminalized, only criminals will have privacy.

When he is cheerful--when the sun shines into his mind--then I venture to peep in, just as far as the light reaches, but no further. It is holy ground where the shadow falls!

What people dont know about you people create. Imagination is a part of being human. They fill in the unknowns with assumptions and not facts. Every man and woman is a mystery unrevealed.

What's worse than being ignored: not being ignored.

When you give up your privacy, you give up your power.

When to others it's not lying. It's privacy.

When you fake emotion for a living, when you make your money providing fantasies for other people, tuning into their worlds and indulging them, you don’t invite someone into your world very easily.

Where the truth remains hidden from the outside, the inside imprisons the hidden.

Where is privacy, if not in the mind?

Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments, the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.

Why am I not posting anything on social media? Well, it's not because I have something to hide, it's because I have nothing that I want you to see.

Within perfect walls there is nothing worth protecting. There is, in fact, nothing. And so we exchange privacy for intimacy.

Why should a little corner of the garden be so important to a woman like Susanna? A woman with a palatial home, and the finest garments. Because imagine it – if you live as she does, surrounded by endless people and their expectations, ones you cannot possibly live up to, you do not even want to live up to – that refuge might be the only place you are safe.

Without privacy, civilized life could not exist.

Yet the possibility of information storage, beyond what men and governments ever had before, can make available at the touch of a button a man's total history (including remarks put on his record by his kindergarten teacher about his ability and character). And with the computer must be placed the modern scientific technical capability which exists for wholesale monitoring of telephone, cable, Telex and microwave transmissions which carry much of today's spoken and written communications. The combined use of the technical capability of listening in on all these forms of communications with the high-speed computer literally leaves no place to hide and little room for privacy.

Without reserve, I can say that my entire identity is in the books I write.

Yet what best protected privacy wasn't concealment but apathy - the fact that other people simply weren't interested.

You already have zero privacy. Get over it! --Scott McNealy CEO Sun Microsystems 1999