Decius wrote this: This is at the crux of present privacy battles. Yes, if you walk out of a strip club and your girlfriend is driving by, its not like she was doing anything wrong. She didn't violate your privacy. But if everything you ever do outside is always recorded all of the time, then in a very real sense you've lost something, even though you can't put a finger on the quantum recordings as being inappropriate, or the access to the quantum recordings as being inappropriate. Its the same thing in numerous contexts. You've no 4th amendment right to privacy in regard to the phone numbers you've dialed, because the phone company presumptively knows them, and you have to presume that they might tell the police. However, generally you wouldn't. Generally you'd think the phone company wouldn't tell the police who you are calling unless they suspected you of something. Its possible that the phone companies have been providing every number that everyone ever dials to the NSA. There is a difference. We better get good at recognizing it.
Ahh.. The good old reasonable expectation of privacy... Let me drill up one of my old points, just to have it in this discussion.... Eskimos have five different words for types of fallen snow. Snow is pretty important to Eskimos. If privacy is important to us, we need to do a better job at how we define different types of privacy, so we can safeguard them in different ways. How do we start defining the different types of privacy, and getting people to accept those semantic distinctions? That would be a a good first step. Then we can get a dialog going about how to protect them... Gogle and the different types of privacy... | 
