Agreed, it's implied by the right to no unlawful search or seizure and the free pursuit of happiness, but it's not spelled out anywhere.

In practice, things that you do or leave in the open and public domain, you have 'no expectation of privacy'. Such as putting something in a trash can and putting it on the curb, there is no expectation that someone else might not dig through it.

Force and FRAUD. Don't forget "fraud". "Unauthorized access" is fraud (i.e. theft) and criminal.

(We should be sending all those b@$t@rds to prison.)

Make no mistake, Blackswan, I'm working on it. However it's not as simple as it once was. Our ability to pay cash for anything but the smallest of purchase, for example, is being made increasingly more difficult. Another thing, for example, it's been years since I've seen a pay phone. Now I understand that, with the proliferation of cell phones, but if you wanted to make a call without anyone knowing where you are, well, you get the idea. Still I'm hopeful...there are ways.

If one does not have the right to privacy then what does one have with respect to privacy?

This is a really touchy subject I think. If you want it private, KEEP it private. Dont tell anyone and dont publish it anywhere.

But this attitude will surely cut down the ability of a society to collaborate, so the rules need to be pretty carefully crafted.

Emotionally, if someone hacks into my website or emails, I am pretty angry and want revenge on them. In the wild west, this would have been handled personally, first with talk, and then with violence. Hopefully, we can come up with rules that are fair and enforceable.

In the meantime, its SPY vs SPY- hire your own hackers to make your site safe, and to teach a lesson to those who cause trouble to others.

From a social point of view, I think that privacy is an evolving right - something that we would not have considered important until recently.

Cast your imaginations back to a small hypothetical Czech town, at some time between about 3000 BC and 1930 AD. Your family has lived in this town for millennia, as have the other members of the town, which is filled with aunts and 2nd cousins. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing as a matter of course. The town is one giant extended family. The idea of an anonymous life is outside of your social expectation.

Now imagine NY in 1950. You are surrounded by millions of strangers who are indifferent to your welfare and possibly inimical to it. Privacy becomes an issue.

Until post-WWII, most of the world was rural and privacy was moot in that context because the scope of interaction was small and personal. The FF (Founding Fathers, not Fantastic Four) were much closer to the Czech town than to the Internet and I think that while personal rights were important to them, it did not really occur to them that privacy was one of these rights.

We are evolving into a society that needs and values privacy and while we can rely on the durable foundation of personal rights to base our laws on, we are really building a new structure and should look at it in that light.

Jan

The exercise of individual rights, as instituted in the American form of government, requires at least intellectual privacy. Without freedom of thought, liberty does not exist. Objectivism is based on the concept of unobstructed self-interest and action, requiring at least intellectual privacy.

That being said, once our thoughts or actions extend beyond our private domain (like when they're posted on Facebook, or stored on a "cloud"), privacy ceases to exist. Personal responsibility is required to maintain real privacy. I store nothing on a "cloud", keeping my backup information local, and my Facebook profile contains no private information for myself, my family, or my friends (real ones, not a phony statistic). Maintaining privacy requires personal dedication and effort.

Let's take a look at the aspects of what we deem "privacy".

The Fourth Amendment outlines the restrictions on the government in much of this regard, though the word "privacy" is never used. It is that unless the government has probable cause, it shouldn't be bothering us in the first place, and that unless they have a specific Warrant, they have no authority to conduct a search of our property (including person, land, or effects - which absolutely in my mind constitutes digital communications). In other words, they should respect the ability and prerogative of a citizen to go about his/her business without the oversight or approval of the government. To me, that's what privacy is about right there.

We can go on into the Fifth Amendment, where the government's relationship with regard to a citizen is outlined as being one of innocent until proven guilty. What this means in practical terms is that until and unless the government has reason by virtue of suspicious circumstances or behavior to involve themselves in our affairs, it should never go looking for evidence of that trouble. The "big brother is watching you" mantra is a violation of public trust because it inherently treats citizens as law-breakers rather than law-abiders.

In the classic parallel to Atlas Shrugged, it is the pretense to gain power that the government needs to watch over everything to keep us safe, when in fact we should say that first and foremost it is the citizens of this nation who bear this responsibility. The government should be relegated strictly to a responsive attitude, because that is the only way "innocent until proven guilty" can work. If one presumes the role of active "prevention" a la Minority Report, one must of necessity assume the worst of the citizens rather than the best.

What concept, exactly, am I stealing? And where, in Objectivism, does it say that a right can be “suspended” by asking a question? The slogan “all property is theft” is clearly a “stolen concept,” since the concept of theft presupposes the concept of property. However, in the current discussion, the concept of privacy does not presuppose the concept of rights. In The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand says, “A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.” Her definition says nothing, pro or con, as to whether privacy is a right.

The very term "privacy" implies individualism and not collectivism.
Ayn would tell you that life, liberty, freedom, privacy, security and property all fall under the category of individual rights.
Without one you don't have any of the others and you will soon be consumed by collectivism.

If you want privacy, you'd better get off the grid. Any information that a company (or government) acquires about you is their property. If you buy a book and a bunch of other products/services, that is not private; it's public. The company that has that information can use it in any way that it sees fit, because it's their property. If they have millions of customers, they can use big data to analyze their customer base to discover as much about their customers as possible, with the intention of better serving their market(s). We are giving up information about ourselves every day in a myriad of ways. The companies (and government) are merely better able to access and use that information than ever before. One thing we might start discussing is how technology is changing the very idea of privacy (and other Constitutional concepts). In an age when everyone paid cash for what they bought, a database was very difficult to build and maintain. Today, with credit cards and online buying, it's automatic.

Yes.
O'Liar would agree.
And he would smile his smile as he moved his lips.

Is hacking theft (the unauthorized taking/using of someone else's property)? If so, we don't need to look to the Constitution. We can merely look to criminal statutes. One doesn't also have a right to stolen property, so the hacker who gets the property from the thief is also culpable.

philosophically....you are begging the question...and are using the "stolen concept"...and by asking the question you also suspend your right to privacy...any claim to the contrary of "privacy" invalidates the idea...besides Objectivism, i refer you to Hobbes and Locke...

Thanks for clarification, CBJ ;^)

My question is whether privacy is a right, as the term is understood in terms of the Objectivist ethics and its prohibition of the initiation of force. In The Objectivist Ethics, Ayn Rand says, "Man’s rights can be violated only by the use of physical force." In The Nature of Government she includes breach of contract, fraud and extortion as variants of physical force. The issue of violation of privacy, and whether it constitutes an initiation of force, is not directly addressed in any of her writings, as far as I know.

Your title asks if its a right. Do you want to restrict the discussion to Objectivism, or discuss rights as your title states?
I answered this from the view of the Bill of Rights before.

The theme of "Anthem" seems to indicate that the author is horrified by the thought of loss of individuality and, by extension, privacy. So I should think that Ayn Rand did in fact believe that privacy is a right.

As an aside, I certainly wouldn't want to live in a society that doesn't value personal privacy. Hell, I'm pretty upset with the treatment of our rights (among them, privacy) in our republic in this, our 21st century.

Ayn Rand loved the Constitution. Privacy is not named as a protected right in the Constitution, but it is implied throughout. Ayn Rand recognized this, pointing it out in one of her more memorable quotes:
"Ours was the first government based on and strictly limited by a written document—the Constitution—which specifically forbids it to violate individual rights or to act on whim. The history of the atrocities perpetrated by all the other kinds of governments—unrestricted governments acting on unprovable assumptions—demonstrates the value and validity of the original political theory on which this country was built.”
I would say a simple case of hacking into a website and then divulging the private information collected would be immoral and criminal. But what if the private information was collected by a third-party with disregard of individual rights and the hacker meant to expose the collection? You got me.