Best 310 quotes in «privacy quotes» category

... 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.

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.

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.

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 government, in effect, declared privacy privatized.

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.

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

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

The place suggested a convent with the modern improvements—an asylum in which privacy, though unbroken, might be not quite identical with privation, and meditation, though monotonous, might be of a cheerful cast.

The public good must come before private interests.

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 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 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.

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

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

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)

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

The sleeper turns his back on everyone.

The Violation of your own Privacy isn't Authenticity

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The truth is like sunlight: It causes cancer.

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.

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.

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.

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 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!

When privacy is criminalized, only criminals will have 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.

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