Quotes About Privacy

My mother's message to black and white folks alike was clear: It's nobody's business what I do for my children, nor how I manage to do it.

No outsider was allowed to glimpse the mansion when Elisabeth was in residence. She could go walking for hours, observing the deer (she always carried wooden rattles with her to protect her from wild boars, who were afraid of the noise) or composing poems.

I did learn one great lesson from a past relationship, and that was to never talk about relationships in print again because I'd rather live my private life than read about it.

It was quiet in the balcony. I often liked to sit up there and think about pellet stoves and then with my thumbs type my blog on my cell phone. My mother and the minister had no idea I was sitting right above them. This is a good thing to remember in this life: no one ever looks up.

Which is to say, I pictured my aunt and now Caroline and then thought of them reading the post, and suddenly I did not want to finish it or publish it, which is why most professional bloggers spend most of their professional lives trying to avoid having that thought, or picturing those people, or having those people in their lives in the first place

I don't like being recognised, I have no interest in being famous at all, I just do what I do. If I could be like Captain Kirk and beam myself up and then beam myself down, I would!

I am regularly asked what the average Internet user can do to ensure his security. My first answer is usually 'Nothing you're screwed'.

We kill people based on metadata.

If something is free, you're not the customer; you're the product.

Data is the pollution problem of the information age, and protecting privacy is the environmental challenge.

One hundred years ago, everyone could have personal privacy. You and your friend could walk into an empty field, look around to see that no one else was nearby, and have a level of privacy that has forever been lost. As Whitfield Diffie has said: "No right of private conversation was enumerated in the Constitution. I don't suppose it occurred to anyone at the time that it could be prevented

The most common misconception about privacy is that it's about having something to hide. "If you aren't doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide," the saying goes, with the obvious implication that privacy only aids wrongdoers.

One of the most surreal aspects of the NSA stories based on the Snowden documents is how they made even the most paranoid conspiracy theorists seem like paragons of reason and common sense.

Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect. It is about choice, and having the power to control how you present yourself to the world.

In the 17th century, the French statesman Cardinal Richelieu famously said, "Show me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough therein to hang him." Lavrentiy Beria, head of Joseph Stalin's secret police in the old Soviet Union, declared, "Show me the man, and I'll show you the crime." Both were saying the same thing: if you have enough data about someone, you can find sufficient evidence to find him guilty of something.

Surveillance makes us feel like prey, just as it makes the surveillors act like predators.

If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear." This is a dangerously narrow conception of the value of privacy. Privacy is an essential human need, and central to our ability to control how we relate to the world. Being stripped of privacy is fundamentally dehumanizing, and it makes no difference whether the surveillance is conducted by an undercover policeman following us around or by a computer algorithm tracking our every move.

In 2014, former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden remarked, "We kill people based on metadata.

Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived of his "panopticon" in the late 1700s as a way to build cheaper prisons. His idea was a prison where every inmate could be surveilled at any time, unawares. The inmate would have no choice but to assume that he was always being watched, and would therefore conform. This idea has been used as a metaphor for mass personal data collection, both on the Internet and off.

Google knows more about what I'm thinking of than I do, because Google remembers all of it perfectly and forever.

For years, well before consumer tracking became the norm, Radio Shack stores would routinely ask their customers for their addresses and phone numbers. For a while I just refused, but that was socially awkward. Instead, I got in the habit of replying with "9800 Savage Road, Columbia, MD, 20755": the address of the NSA.

Those of us who fought the crypto wars, as we call them, thought we had won them in the 1990s. What the Snowden documents have shown us is that instead of dropping the notion of getting backdoor government access, the NSA and FBI just kept doing it in secret.

Mug shot extortion sites turn this sort of thing into a business. Mug shots are public record, but they're not readily available. Owners of mug shot sites acquire the photos in bulk and publish them online, where everybody can find them, then charge individuals to remove their photos from the sites.