Best 310 quotes in «privacy quotes» category

We're all torn between the desire for privacy and the fear of loneliness.

We understand the concerns that people have with not only protecting our values, but our privacy interests as well. We think that the USA Freedom Act was a good resolution of that.

Whatever you do, in the privacy of your own rain shower, is your own business

When I worry about privacy I worry about peer-to-peer invasion of privacy. About the fact that anytime anything of any note happens, there are three arms holding cell phones with cameras in them or video records capturing the event ready to go on the nightly news, if necessary. And I think that does change a lot our sense of what is going on in our neighborhoods.

When I was young, I was all about personal sovereignty and that junk, because there was no privacy and the available ideologies were collective, both socialism/communism and nationalism.

When my sister and I were growing up, she was made out to be the goody-goody one.

You already have zero privacy - get over it.

When the social network doesn't find it convenient to have privacy, we say, "Okay, social network, you don't want privacy, maybe we won't have it either." But we did this without having the conversation.

Without whining and without making myself a tragic figure, there is no replacement for the loss of your privacy. It's a huge sacrifice.

You have plenty of liberals out there who are all for the cops raiding their political enemies, they're all for the cops doing whatever they have to do to get whatever goods they want on their political enemies. And yet the Patriot Act comes, oh, you can't do it, it's an invasion of privacy. And yet in some cases they don't care about other people's privacy. Privacy is irrelevant to them depending on what the target is.

You don't owe anybody the present other than yourself. Take time for you. Respect yourself and your privacy. Set boundaries.

27. So often, we go through our battles in private. As it was with me and with many of the women in my generation. We were taught and reared and molded to keep that stiff upper lip and to never explain in public how deeply some people have hurt us. I cannot get away from that mold. I am comfortable in it. I derive my sanity from it.

You know the Buddhists believe that sometimes when everything is in turmoil, it's because something wonderful is ready to be born and that thing is distracting you so it can have some privacy during the birthing process.

All of a sudden, we've lost a lot of control. We can't turn off our internet; we can't turn off our smartphones; we can't turn off our computers. You used to ask a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it's not God. [CNN interview (December 8, 2010)]

A fish with his mouth closed never gets caught.

A Lenina le resultaba muy inquietante. En primer lugar, su manía de hacerlo todo en privado. Lo que en la práctica significaba no hacer nada en absoluto. Porque ¿qué podía hacerse en privado?

. . . and my ego gladly avoids leaning out the window.

Always be lenient with people and keep their privacy, as they can share their problems with you. These steps can help you in making your relationship strong.

And do you know the story about Haydn’s head? They cut it away from the still-warm cadaver so some insane scientist could take apart the brain and pinpoint the location of musical genius. And the Einstein Story? He’d carefully written his will with instructions to cremate him. They followed his orders, but his disciple, ever loyal and devoted, refused to live without the master’s gaze on him. Before the cremation, he took the eyes of the cadaver and put them in a bottle of alcohol to keep them watching him until the moment he should die himself. That’s why I said that the crematory fire is the only way our bodies can escape them. It’s the only absolute death. And I don’t want any other. Jean-Marc, I want an absolute death.

And so it is inevitable that the day has come when we write about privacy with such nostalgia, analysing it as we would some unearthed fossil of a creature our human eyes had never fallen on.

And so we exchange privacy for intimacy. We gamble with it, hoping that by exposing ourselves, someone will find a way in. This is why the human animal will always be vulnerable: because it wants to be.

Americans don't care about privacy, and the people running the country couldn't be happier.

A professional man of letters, especially if he is much at war with unscrupulous enenemies, is naturally jealous of his privacy... so it was, I think, with Dryden.

Apparently, the glasses didn’t need to be connected to the internet for the wearer to poke into someone’s personal life. Even though a search engine could lead to an individual’s address, the browser couldn’t actually physically take you there. What had this inventor done? Did he have any idea?

Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

Are you willing to accept anything less than the credit you want, the credit you need and the credit you deserve?

Bene vixit, bene qui latuit." (To live well is to live concealed.)

As people tend to ring-fence their privacy they become ever-more “incommunicado”, deliberately untouchable. By retreating in the secrecy of the safe haven of their living, their habitats become impregnable castles, with the draw-bridges of non-attendance always up. Adopting an attitude of "ghosting", constantly shamming ‘absence’, homes gradually become ghost houses and, extensively, communities grow into ghost towns. (“Could we leave the door unlocked?”)

...because it is the privilige and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.

But suicides are mysterious, and one must respect their mystery.

Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [...] and the like.

But secluding my experience during that early period was both cowardly and wise. Some things are too fragile, too vulnerable to bring into the public eye. Tender things with tiny roots tend to wither in the glare of public scrutiny. By holding my awakening within, I contained the energy of it, and it fed me the way blood feeds muscle. It fed me a certain propelling energy, and I kept moving forward.

Father Brendan Flynn: "A woman was gossiping with her friend about a man whom they hardly knew - I know none of you have ever done this. That night, she had a dream: a great hand appeared over her and pointed down on her. She was immediately seized with an overwhelming sense of guilt. The next day she went to confession. She got the old parish priest, Father O' Rourke, and she told him the whole thing. 'Is gossiping a sin?' she asked the old man. 'Was that God All Mighty's hand pointing down at me? Should I ask for your absolution? Father, have I done something wrong?' 'Yes,' Father O' Rourke answered her. 'Yes, you ignorant, badly-brought-up female. You have blamed false witness on your neighbor. You played fast and loose with his reputation, and you should be heartily ashamed.' So, the woman said she was sorry, and asked for forgiveness. 'Not so fast,' says O' Rourke. 'I want you to go home, take a pillow upon your roof, cut it open with a knife, and return here to me.' So, the woman went home: took a pillow off her bed, a knife from the drawer, went up the fire escape to her roof, and stabbed the pillow. Then she went back to the old parish priest as instructed. 'Did you gut the pillow with a knife?' he says. 'Yes, Father.' 'And what were the results?' 'Feathers,' she said. 'Feathers?' he repeated. 'Feathers; everywhere, Father.' 'Now I want you to go back and gather up every last feather that flew out onto the wind,' 'Well,' she said, 'it can't be done. I don't know where they went. The wind took them all over.' 'And that,' said Father O' Rourke, 'is gossip!

Clothes falling away signals a situation that I'll likely avoid putting into words. If clothes don't dress it up, don't expect talk to, either.

Destruction of privacy via surveillance programs engineered by Great Powers widens the existing power imbalance between the ruling elite and everyone else. Its impact on global south will be colossal.

Do not, as long as you live, ever again allow your real name to be coupled with your home address.

Either a municipal bog is a private place or it isn't. If it is a private place in which to shit, how is it not a private place in which to fellate?

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

Eventually all things are known. And few matter.

Expecting to fix privacy problem by passing few laws will not work as the cancer is much deeper than this in our surveillance society.

Famous people lose their privacy and are always under public critique. The miseries and failures of famous men are much more saleable than their successes. People love to gossip when celebrities fall from grace and leaders are caught in scandals.

Control people's sexuality and you control them. After all, if people allow you to dictate how they behave in the privacy of their own bedrooms, there is very little that they will not allow you to control.

Don't oppose mass surveillance for your own sake. Oppose it for the activists, lawyers, journalists and all of the other people our liberty relies on.

Es soll keine Geheimnisse mehr geben, sagen die neuen Überwachungstheoretiker und meinen damit etwas recht Interessantes: dass die Ära, in der Geheimnisse zählten, in der Geheimnisse ihre Macht über das Leben von menschen ausüben konnten [...], vorbei ist; nicht, was sich zu wissen lohnt, kann nicht innerhalb von Sekunden und ohne großen Aufwand aufgedeckt werden; das Privatleben ist im Grunde ein Ding der Vergangenheit.

Every time I do an interview people ask similar questions, such as "What is the most significant story that you have revealed?" […] There really is only one overarching point that all of these stories have revealed, and that is–and I say this without the slightest bit of hyperbole or melodrama; it's not metaphorical and it's not figurative; it is literally true–that the goal of the NSA and it's five eyes partners in the English speaking world–Canada, New Zealand, Australia and especially the UK–is to eliminate privacy globally, to ensure that there could be no human communications that occur electronically, that evades their surveillance net; they want to make sure that all forms of human communications by telephone or by Internet, and all online activities are collected, monitored, stored and analyzed by that agency and by their allies. That means, to describe that is to describe a ubiquitous surveillance state; you don't need hyperbole to make that claim, and you do not need to believe me when I say that that's their goal. Document after document within the archive that Edward Snowden provided us declare that to be their goal. They are obsessed with searching out any small little premise of the planet where some form of communications might take place without they being able to invade it.

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

...For it began to occur to him that one way to become private was to respect another's privacy.

For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies. Sabina despised literature in which people give away all kinds of intimate secrets about themselves and their friends. A man who loses his privacy loses everything, Sabina thought. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.

For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves not others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies. Sabina despised literature in which people give away all kinds of intimate secrets about themselves and their friends. A man who loses his privacy loses everything, Sabina thought. And a man who gives it up on his own free will is a monster. That is why Sabina did not suffer in the least from having to keep her love a secret. On the contrary, only by doing so could she live the truth.

He didn’t have regular email like everyone else. He couldn’t afford that digital fingerprint that the NSA, the CIA, the FBI and all the other espionage alphabeticals counted on for their privacy-bashing surveillance of the entire formerly free world.