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Do the following rights exist? Or are they needs misunderstood as righ

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Edwin

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Do the following rights exist? Or are they needs misunderstood as rights?

1. the right to anonymity.

2. the right to "not being recognized/identified without consent".

3. the right to privacy.

Recently German government banned Facebook's use of face recognition for auto tagging. They & others cited the above rights as justification.

I am wondering whether what the German government did is moral.

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The legitimate sense in which one can speak of a "right to privacy" is the right to be secure in one's own property, so that, for instance, no one can trespass on or search your house without your consent (and the government needs a warrant to do so). There is no "right to not being recognized/identified without consent," since recognizing or identifying someone doesn't constitute an initiation of force.

So to answer your question, the German government's actions are immoral; the ban violates Facebook's property rights by dictating how the company may use its technology.

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  • 1 month later...

The right to life entails a right to porperty (as man can not live without keeping that which he produced) The right to property means the right to keep that property and to have full and unfettered use of it which is in turn privacy, in or on your property. This does not however mean that you have the right to be secret in a public place as it is not violating your property to identify you.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Do the following rights exist? Or are they needs misunderstood as rights?

1. the right to anonymity.

2. the right to "not being recognized/identified without consent".

3. the right to privacy.

Recently German government banned Facebook's use of face recognition for auto tagging. They & others cited the above rights as justification.

I am wondering whether what the German government did is moral.

These are immoral irrationla "rights" which are created by the government to interfere with the free market. The government has no business interfering with the rights of facebook to serve their customer. The best protector of anonymity and privacy is the free market.

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"The right to life entails a right to porperty (as man can not live without keeping that which he produced)"

This is off-topic, but you remind me of a problem I have always had with this formulation: man CAN live without keeping that which he produced (slaves, for example, had no property rights -- or should I say, HAVE no property rights, as slavery is still around -- yet they don't drop dead on the spot.). As soon as you get into "yes, but I'm talking about more than biological life, I'mtalking about man as he SHOULD live", it gets subjective, not objective. So what is the proper foundation for property rights? I believe they exist, but what is their basis?

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snapback.pngEdwin, on 04 August 2011 - 01:50 AM, said:

Do the following rights exist? Or are they needs misunderstood as rights?

1. the right to anonymity.

2. the right to "not being recognized/identified without consent".

3. the right to privacy.

Recently German government banned Facebook's use of face recognition for auto tagging. They & others cited the above rights as justification.

I am wondering whether what the German government did is moral.

I think not.

The right to not have one's face recognized is one's own choice. And should be one's own. And I think that the answer is software that can automate the work we would do as individual's to help our own plight, i.e. choose yay or nay to a given pop-up as it is expressed on the web.

In terms of Rand's Objectivist philosophy, there is no right to have a government that is our Nanny. First and foremost, but not as first-causality necessarily.

It falls right under the right to own one's own store or shop I would say, online or otherwise. This is all akin to our choice to be able to designate smoking or non at a restaurant. I thoroughly agree that it is the right of the shop owner

to choose whether his shop is smoking or non. In the perfect laisée faire model safety would come from variety. The same reason that Monopolies are impossible according to Objectivism.

The Cultural Take: On the other hand, advertisers understand cultural context and environment. That said, they know how much the: 'technically speaking' kind of consumer behavior is what builds their businesses. Yeah, sure, we are able to choose, but under what conditions? Most consumer statistics reveal that behind the scenes we are actually making very different choices than how we'd like to be seen. We as objectivists and Objectivists, want to be seen as 'Heroic Volitional Animals,' but are we always? Should we really be that OCD? Those same business stats btw, are pretty clear that most of us, most of our lives, are making some very foolhardy decisions pretty routinely in terms of online agreements and popups etc. Which are very important a lot of the time. We have a responsibility not to be lazy, too.

But if we're talking about our interaction with the web in any typical modern setting (my self and voice now excepted being an Art & Author Entrepreneur that receives Inspiration all day every day ;) ) we as average Americans :( need to come to terms with this life, question it and get a new perspective on it I think. I mean, we are typically (I've waited tables for 15 years for instance) engaged in a world and life of slimmed down 'me-time' individual time and space, which is pretty much not our choosing and have very little time these days under the 9-5 superstructure (of human slavery), especially when you are the typical American: married with children in some fashion or other.

The choice to pre-designate by law and in ethics be good to be a choice, private or non, and may be ours to make, but in what, like 3.5 seconds or less?? (the average person's attention span in terms of an agreement pop-up). And how many choices like that do we make on the web per day? Hundreds if not thousands if we are businessmen and perhaps I'd gander in the 60's for the average American. Did I mention that the web is mine and many other people's sole source of income?

So, in conclusion the answer to this question under this blog or 'probe,' to my point of view, (being objectivist and Not 'Objectivist') --is that Rights, since they do not exist in reality, (save absolute Reality) must be invented to produce the designated desirable outcomes. What is that outcome? If it is peace we aim for, I would say: no it is not the right of the government to make maladaptive laws for behavior that, if it were our choice, would not erode the pursuit of freedom from beaurocratic side-effects. Such is typical of maladaptive law (i.e. Socialism rather than having the balls to be a straight-up Communist).

On the other hand once again, we should also engage in software that protects us and makes 'Philosophy Level' decisions like Facebook's auto-camming feature, automatically. I am only imagining that this software exists. But hey, we're living in fantastic, exponential times, right? Anything you imagine in terms of Tech is likely to exist in some form or other. One day I looked down at my watch, the one my fiancé bought me. It was Dior. And so sleek that I didn't even realize I was really looking at a dial-in and my own love's face was staring back at me. Literally. It was a Dior-Watch-Video Phone.

Screw rings. :)

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"The right to life entails a right to porperty (as man can not live without keeping that which he produced)"

This is off-topic, but you remind me of a problem I have always had with this formulation: man CAN live without keeping that which he produced (slaves, for example, had no property rights -- or should I say, HAVE no property rights, as slavery is still around -- yet they don't drop dead on the spot.). As soon as you get into "yes, but I'm talking about more than biological life, I'mtalking about man as he SHOULD live", it gets subjective, not objective. So what is the proper foundation for property rights? I believe they exist, but what is their basis?

I think the fact that human life is defined by the combination of both the physiological and the psychological provides the objective basis for how a human being should live. Or, at the very least, the basis for identifying that a human life is more than simple biological existence. A slave can survive, but it cannot live within the full context of what it means to be a human being.

The right to life identifies what a human being is, with respect to the above, and the right to property is a corollary to the right to life, as the former cannot be exercised without the latter.

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