"Most people are privacy pragmatists who can be trusted to make
intelligent trade-offs between functionality and privacy."
"Our lives will inevitably become visible to others, so the
real issue is mutual visibility, achieving a balance of power
by enabling us to watch the people who are watching us."
"Once you really analyze it, the concept of privacy is so
nebulous that it provides no useful guidance for action."
"People *want* these systems, as indicated by the percentage
of them who sign up for them once they become available."
"Concern for privacy is anti-social and obstructs the building
of a democratic society."
"Privacy regulation is just one more category of government
interference in the market, which after all is much better
at weighing individuals' relative preferences for privacy
and everything else than bureaucratic rules could ever be."
"There's no privacy in public."
"We favor limited access."
"Privacy in these systems has not emerged as a national issue."
"If you have nothing to hide then you should have no concern
for your privacy."
"Privacy advocates oppose national ID cards, but they don't
talk about the benefits of such cards. In a country with a
foolproof, unambiguous means of determining identity, nobody
has to suffer cases of mistaken identity, for example from
arrest warrants issued for people with similar names and dates
of birth."
"Privacy must be balanced with many other considerations."
"Attempts to prevent companies from distributing personal
information are censorship, and that sort of censorship is no
more likely to succeed than any other sort in the new world
of the Internet."
"We hear a lot of hoopla against companies that place existing
databases of personal information on the Internet or publish
them on CD-ROM's. But all those companies are doing is making
access to information available to everybody, not just to the
powerful. This is a force for equality and democracy, and it's
ironic to hear supposed civil liberties advocates opposing it."
"People who collect welfare and other government benefits
have no grounds for complaint about fingerprinting and other
measures intended to suppress fraud. They need to learn that
rights come with responsibilities, and in particular the right
to free handouts comes with the responsibility to cooperate
with fraud prevention. Surely it's not too much to ask that
people should identify themselves before getting free money."
"Privacy prevents the marketplace from functioning efficiently.
When a company knows more about you, it can tailor its
offerings more specifically to your needs."
"We don't need more laws about privacy. Our operations are
already governed by dozens and dozens of laws, each creating
its own layer of red tape."
"The constant insistence on privacy encourages incivility".
"The closing of voter registration lists, drivers' license
records, and the like in the name of privacy is part of a
dangerous trend away from our tradition of openness, toward
making it more difficult for the public to access public
information."
"The information is already public because it concerns things
that happened in a public place."
"We are just selling access to information from public sources.
If we can gather this information, so can anybody else."
"The right to privacy is an elitist concept because it provides
an excuse for the powerful to keep their secrets while they go
ahead and invade the rest of our lives."
"If you think you're being persecuted then you're probably just
flattering yourself. Big organizations don't really care about
you as an individual, just about their own narrow goals."
"New technologies will make it possible to protect privacy."
"You're right, we do have privacy problems. People are
understandably upset when they assume that they have certain
privacy rights and then later find out that they do not. We
must communicate with people so that they understand the actual
situation in advance."
"If you ask people in a poll whether they're concerned about
privacy then of course they'll say yes. But if people really
cared about their privacy then we would see them flocking to
debit cards, which are much more similar to cash than credit
cards. The fact is that they get a benefit from credit cards,
namely the float on their money, and they are evidently willing
to surrender some control over their personal information in
exchange for that benefit."
"We have to weigh the interests of the individual against the
interests of society as a whole."
"Fear of extensive merger of databases is misplaced because in
actually practice it is extremely difficult to merge databases.
Two databases that arose in different organizations, or for
different purposes, will probably be incompatible in many ways,
for example through the different meanings they assign to data
fields that sound superficially the same. Organizations that
maintain personal data have their hands full just maintaining
the accuracy of the databases they have, without trying to
create the one gigantic Big Brother hyperdatabase that privacy
advocates are always warning us against."
"Privacy advocates are crying wolf. We have been hearing these
predictions of some kind of privacy disaster scenario for 20+
years and its hasn't happened yet."
"AVI toll-collection systems don't really identify the person
who is driving the car, just the car itself. It's not clear
what weight that kind of circumstantial evidence would have in
court, and if it's no good in court then it's not clear to me
what we're supposed to be worrying about."
"Attacks on direct mail under the guise of privacy concerns are
really attacks on free speech. Mail is a democratic medium,
available to all. When newspapers and television stations
publicize attacks on mail from the tiny handful of self-styled
privacy activists, their real agenda is to suppress competition
to their centralized control of communication in our society."
"These issues about computers and privacy aren't really new and
aren't really about computers. Everything you can do with a
computer could be done before with paper files."
"Computer technology isn't bringing us into some scary new era
that we can't understand. Quite the contrary, it is returning
us to the old-time village where everybody knew everybody
else's business. That's the normal state of people's lives
-- the state that was lost as modern society and technology
caused us all to be separated into cubicles. Privacy is thus
a distinctly modern obsession, and an unhealthy one too."
"The problem isn't privacy per se. The problem is the
invention of a fictional "right to privacy" by American courts.
This supposed "right", found nowhere in the Constitution,
has been running amok, providing the courts with excuses for
inventing artificial rights, such as the right to abortion,
and interfering in people's lives in other ways, for example
by restricting the questions that employers can ask potential
employees in interviews. Ironic but true, the real agenda
behind this supposed "right to be let alone" is actually a
power-grab by which courts extend their control over society.
The best guarantee of privacy is freedom -- the freedom of
people to negotiate their relationships among themselves by
themselves, without government interference."
"It is too costly to implement such elaborate safeguards."
"Technology has changed the very ontological category of the
person, who is no longer just a flesh-and-blood organism but
also a far-flung digital entity as well. In this context, when
people's identities are distributed across cyberspace, concepts
of privacy don't even make sense any more. In that sense we
should accept that we have entered the post-privacy age."
"I don't care about privacy."
"Those same technologies that cause privacy concerns also
provide positive social benefits."
"All this talk of Panopticons is ridiculously overblown.
We are not living in any sort of totalitarian prison society
just because we get too many magazine subscription offers in
the mail. Let's be sensible grown-ups and weigh the costs
and benefits of the technology, rather than exaggerating with
dramatic but misleading metaphors from trendy philosophers."
"Privacy advocates claim that Caller ID is an invasion of
privacy. The other point of view is that nuisance phone call
are an invasion of privacy, which Caller ID allows people to
take some control over."
Credit reporting agencies provide a service that people want.
Indeed, people regularly go to great lengths to cause a record
of their credit history to be created in a credit reporting
agency's database, precisely because they want to enjoy the
benefits of having a credit record."
"If you look hard enough at who is really agitating about
privacy, you start finding a lot of tax resisters, cult
members, and other marginal characters with something to hide.
It really makes you wonder about the motives of the high-minded
people who get quoted in the newspaper issuing Chicken Little
predictions about Big Brother."
"The technology to create electronic healthcare networks is
here, but its spread has been slowed by court rulings on the
privacy of medical records. This is clearly an area where
Congressional action is needed. If the issues are looked
upon as providing modern healthcare rather than an invasion
of privacy, such an act will probably fly."
"We provide these access tools for our customers' convenience.
When we set up cumbersome barriers between our customers and
the information they need, we get complaints."
"Organized crime poses a more serious threat to society than do
government and corporate snooping. Privacy protection disables
a key weapon that law enforcement presently uses to keep
organized crime under control."
"Epidemiologists need broad access to medical records in order
to detect patterns of disease. Without these patterns, the
disease might go uncured, even undiagnosed."
"When people talk about the need to protect privacy, it usually
turns out that they are only talking about individual privacy.
But we need to balance individual privacy with organizational
privacy."