Billy Brown, <bbrown@conemsco.com>, writes:
> I would suggest that the rights of freedom of speech and freedom of contract
> are sufficient to accomplish everything that should properly be done to
> protect individual privacy. You can easily claim the right to conceal your
> doing via encryption, blind agents, assumed names (or refusal to provide
> identification), and so forth on these grounds. If these are the areas you
> are concerned about, I support you.
Yes, this seems a reasonable approach that most of us will agree with.
There are a lot of cool crypto technologies that can allow people to
remain anonymous while still being able to bind themselves to contracts,
and have other forms of accountability.
> OTOH, you do not have a right to tell someone else what they can do with
> their own records, or what they can truthfully say about you to others. You
> can refuse to provide information you don't want others to have, and you can
> attempt to persuade them not to do things you don't like, but you do not
> have a right to use force to stop them. We can legitimately forbid
> government from doing this sort of thing, but not business.
One concern I have here is your word "truthfully". Earlier, in the
discussion of miniarchy vs anarchy, you included "fraud" in your list of
crimes, along with murder, theft, and so on. Fraud is basically lying
in a commercial context.
Would we really want to make it illegal to tell a lie in some cases?
Making lying illegal would also suggest making slander and libel illegal. This is a terrible gray area in the legal system, with all kinds of loopholes and tests for when you can lie, is it parody, did you know it would cause damage, is the person a public figure, etc. I wouldn't want to see all this baggage in a miniarchy or my chosen private law provider.
Hal