The modern internet economy in many ways evolved out of a casual disregard for secrecy and privacy!
In the age of surveillance, it is easy to forget that governments weathered robust privacy protections for centuries. But secrecy is central to the vitality of democracy.
Privacy as a legal construct is relatively recent. Until Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis penned their famous 1890 essay “The Right to Privacy”, private information was protected from disclosure and surveillance by another name: the secrecy of correspondence. Perhaps ironically, the right to secrecy has long been considered sacrosanct – both in domestic and international communications – a fundamental precondition for the honest and free flow of ideas and information and the development of a mature international political system. The right to have secrets, despite centuries of legal lineage and a firm grounding in democratic theory…
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/12/where-did-the-principle-of-secrecy-in-correspondence-go
Posted by Dont Mine on Me
