Gigi’s Reviews > The Praxeology of Privacy > Status Update

“If a proposed ethical norm cannot be coherently stated without contradiction, that is a demonstration that the norms fails as a norms, not an inconvenience for the proposer alone…The criterion of non-contradictory assertability is not arbitrary but constitutive of what it means to propose a norm at all.”

“The totalitarian who claims “different rules apply after the debate” has not offered an argument but a declaration of intended force.”

“Action without purpose is not action but reflex of accident.”

“Hope is a poor basis for privacy, so the discipline is always to remove the capability that would require hope in the first place.”

“…the Austrian method treats privacy as built into the conditions of action, not as an optional sentiment or bourgeois preference.”

“If secrecy is treated as a whole of privacy , ordinary control over personal information starts to look extreme”

“…It redefines privacy as concealment. Once that move succeeds, resistance to surveillance can be painted as suspicious from the start.” Nowadays you’re a nefarious person if you’re not an aspiring public figure!

“Selective disclosure is a stronger notion than concealment or secrecy, and conflating the three is the main reason public debate about surveillance stays stuck.”