Best 310 quotes in «privacy quotes» category

Of course, to be truly 'surveillance free' required unpredictability or its cousin, spontaneity.

Oh, tell me, who first declared, who first proclaimed that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own real interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else… . Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child!

Ok, fair enough, people have the right to know! But is their right to know more important than my right to safety? Why should I reveal something about myself that will put me in danger? Why do you keep quiet about being a vampire?

Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publications, the free press as we know it disappears. Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. The purchase of a book or pamphlet today may result in a subpoena tomorrow. Fear of criticism goes with every person into the bookstall. The subtle, imponderable pressures of the orthodox lay hold. Some will fear to read what is unpopular, what the powers-that-be dislike. When the light of publicity may reach any student, any teacher, inquiry will be discouraged. The books and pamphlets that are critical of the administration, that preach an unpopular policy in domestic or foreign affairs, that are in disrepute in the orthodox school of thought will be suspect and subject to investigation. The press and its readers will pay a heavy price in harassment. But that will be minor in comparison with the menace of the shadow which government will cast over literature that does not follow the dominant party line. If the lady from Toledo can be required to disclose what she read yesterday and what she will read tomorrow, fear will take the place of freedom in the libraries, book stores, and homes of the land. Through the harassment of hearings, investigations, reports, and subpoenas government will hold a club over speech and over the press." [United States v. Rumely, 345 U.S. 41 (1953)]

One measure of a truly free society is the vigor with which it protects the liberties of its individual citizens. As technology has advanced in America, it has increasingly encroached on one of those liberties--what I term the right of personal privacy. Modern information systems, data banks, credit records, mailing list abuses, electronic snooping, the collection of personal data for one purpose that may be used for another--all these have left millions of Americans deeply concerned by the privacy they cherish. And the time has come, therefore, for a major initiative to define the nature and extent of the basic rights of privacy and to erect new safeguards to ensure that those rights are respected.

Only people who have something to hide make a fuss about privacy.

On the corporate side, the upshot of our data (the benefit to us) isn't all that interesting unless you're an economist. In theory, your data means ads are better targeted, which means less marketing spend is wasted, which means lower prices. At the very least, the data they sell means you get to use genuinely useful services like Facebook and Google without paying money for them.

Privacy is precious in cities. It is indispensable. Perhaps it is precious and indispensable everywhere, but in most places you cannot get it. In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the city everyone does not—only those you choose to tell will know much about you.

Our fellowman either may voluntarily reveal to us the truth about himself, or by dissimulation he may deceive us as to the truth. No other object of knowledge can thus of its own initiative, either enlighten us with reference to itself or conceal itself, as a human being can. No other knowable object modifies its conduct from consideration of its being understood or misunderstood.

People trudge through most days with little excitement in their lives. But our digital age provides so many opportunities to give people an authentic view of who you are or what your company strives to be, thus creating touch points of commonality that draw you into closer friendship with others.

Personalization is based on a bargain. In exchange for the service of filtering, you hand large companies an enormous amount of data about your daily life--much of which you might not trust your friends with.

Philip Johnson is a highbrow. A highbrow is a man educated beyond his capacity. His house is a box of glass — not shelter. The meaning of the word shelter includes privacy.

Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.

Privacy, precisely because it ensures that we are never fully known to others, provides a shelter for imaginative freedom, curiosity and self-reflection.

Privacy is not dead, just cumbersome and getting more and more expensive.

Privacy is the very essence of human existence. One wonders why the Indian Supreme Court took so long to reach that conclusion.

Privacy inevitably falls prey to technology.

Privacy and pollution are similar problems. Both cause harm that is invisible and pervasive. Both result from exploitation of a resource--whether it is land, water, or information. Both suffer from difficult attribution. It is not easy to identify a single pollutant or a single piece of data that caused harm. Rather, the harm often comes from an accumulation of pollutants, or an assemblage of data. And the harm of both pollution and privacy is collective. No one person bears the burden of all pollution; all of society suffers when the air is dirty and the water undrinkable. Similarly, we all suffer when we live in fear that our data will be used against us by companies trying to exploit us or police officers sweeping us into a lineup. (212-213)

Privacy is something you can sell, but you can't buy it back.

Questions are as supple as willow wands, it's easy to brush by them and slip them aside, and no one the worse for it.

Secrets,” Kohler finally said, “are a luxury we can no longer afford.

Referred to euphemistically to children as 'privates', the vagina is no longer permitted to be private. Instead, it is photographed independently of the face, stripped of identity, of emotional and historical and economic context, and in the service of men: public.

Saying of the Prophet Privacy Whoever invades people´s privacy corrupts them.

She could recognize individual drones better than she could recognize individual people. But chances were the drone that had shadowed her for the past five days was better with faces than she was.

So this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.

Since the 1970s, there has been a continual tendency to over-estimate the surveillance capacities of new technologies. In the sense of the physical invasion of privacy, surveillance comprises five sequential events: the capacity to observe; the act of observation; comprehension of what is seen; intervention on the basis of that knowledge; and a consequent change of behaviour by the subject. Too often the final four have been assumed from the possibility of the first.

Something needs to be said about the role of anonymity and digital pseudonyms. This is a topic for an essay unto itself, of course. Are true names really needed? Why are they asked for? Does the nation state have any valid reason to demand they be used? People want to know who they are dealing with, for psychological/evolutionary reasons and to better ensure traceability should they need to locate a person to enforce the terms of a transaction. The purely anonymous person is perhaps justifiably viewed with suspicion. And yet pseudonyms are successful in many cases. We rarely know whether someone who presents himself by some name is “actually” that person. Authors, artists, performers, etc., often use pseudonyms. What matters is persistence and nonforgeability. Crypto provides this.

Technology would have long ago made privacy impossible, except that this had only made it more precious and desirable--and in the close confines of starship life, respect for another's privacy had become a powerful tradition.

Stranger: Do you believe in Jesus, my friend? Foreigner: O yes, I do but who the hell are you?

Sure, but…” Roz thinks about everything she uses Information for, all the time. “If you’re driving, and you come to an intersection, how do you know what vehicles might be approaching from either side?” “Well, we try not to design blind intersections,” Maria says. “And we use mirrors.” Mirrors! Ingenious. “You must have found it much easier than we did when Information went out during the elections,” Roz says, trying to offer Maria’s odd cult some credit.

... taking some precautions may attract unwanted attention and scrutiny, even if the precautions otherwise succeed in protecting your information. For example, if detected by a border agent, the fact that you wiped your hard drive may prompt the agent to ask why you did so. Even traveling without devices or data that most travelers typically have could attract suspicion and questions.

The ideal way to ensure a healthy digestion is to go to the movies. The movie house is a place of truce, a non-combat area where, once the lights are dimmed and the film is running, the only reality is the movie itself. All the little realities of the individuals in the audience are canceled.

That hedge provides almost complete privacy from cars and pedestrians, and I would bet he and his wife do it more than the national average.

...the city usually only dulled and interrupted him. He required quiet, and to keep himself to himself, more than any writer he’d known. He was a shy beast who loved his burrow.

The government, in effect, declared privacy privatized.

The characters who go to make up my stories and novels are not portraits. Characters I invent along with the story that carries them. Attached to them are what I've borrowed, perhaps unconsciously, bit by bit, of persons I have seen or noticed or remembered in the flesh - a cast of countenance here, a manner of walking there, that jumps to the visualizing mind when a story is under way. I don't write by invasion into the life of a real person: my own sense of privacy is too strong for that; and I also know instinctively that living people to whom you are close - those known to you in ways too deep, too overflowing, ever to be plumbed outside love - do not yield to, could never fit into, the demands of a story. Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write most entirely out of yourself, that a character becomes in its own right another human being on the page.

The discretion of the watcher versus the privacy of the watched was just another arms race; this one, I could see, would run and run.

The first right of any person in any society must be the right to communicate. Without communication there is no way to safeguard our other rights or for us to participate fully in a society. When your right to communicate is interrupted by those who would be your voice, your face or your representative, you are being subjected to the governance of another.

The missing link between humans and apes? It's certainly those brutes who haven't yet learned to respect privacy.

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.

The more I'm let alone and not worried the better I can function.

The only way to stop big data from becoming big brother is introduce privacy laws that protect the basic human rights online.

The public good must come before private interests.

The quest for freedom in the real world is like living in a room with many windows. You can connect with the outside atmosphere whenever you want to, by opening the windows and when you seek privacy or solitude, you can close them.

The question, from pundits and constituents, was obvious and loud: If you aren't transparent, what are you hiding? Though some citizens and commentators objected on grounds of privacy, asserting that government, at virtually every level, had always needed to do some things in private for the sake of security and efficiency, the momentum crushed all such arguments and the progression continued. If you weren't operating in the light of day, what were you doing in the shadows?

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.

The most reliable topic for small talk is the goings-on of stars whether they’re rising or falling, and whether nor not a particular story is truth or fiction. This is way out of balance. It invades the privacy of men and women who didn’t give up being human when they became famous, and it negates the meaning inherent in our own lives. (300)

The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door.