[stereolambda]

Skipping the semi-clickbait title. I like how the author goes into a deeper analysis of the concept, but I, too, don't agree with stressing the privacy-freedom of speech link. Privacy is about denying other people the information that they may use to obtain power over you in some way. This may include politics, but mainly the personal things that shouldn't concern other people at all.

Being able to say anything controversial in private is a somewhat worthless freedom in the context of politics. You might get that, in practice (in the past?), in some dictatorships, and still be subject to their arbitrary power. The important thing is the freedom of speech in public. People may not like you and dissociate from you, but your livelihood should not be in danger. No one, such as like your employer, should be able to force you into anything.

The thing missed in many idealistic analyses like that is that the society has to grant you some standard of living and social environment in order for this to work. You have to be economically safe enough to speak relatively freely. People have to look at you and assume good intentions and stress the value of your liberty, even if they don't like what you're saying or doing. It's easy to see that even in the West you can still be deprived of this because of ethnicity or economic situation. This doesn't justify taking away the freedoms that people have, but shows that this isn't and never was a fully solved problem.

I would agree with the author that laser-focusing on government power is deeply mistaken: everyone in society has some degree of power over all the people that they interact with. We have to confront this fact consciously.

Observing Eastern Europe, I've become especially wary of using the concept of freedom of speech for demagoguery (which this piece, to be clear, doesn't do). In countries like Russia and increasingly Poland you can practice various kinds of Western-"problematic" speech with loud applause from the government and its constituency. This is eagerly sold by the ruling group as "freedom", even though offending the ruling religion can land you in arrest. Yeah, I'm now doubly careful if people really mean full freedom for everyone, or just take only the empty word for the purposes of their favorite unfreedom.

[umilegenio]

I am the original author. I don't disagree with anything you said here, but it does not seem it contradicts what I am trying to say. Probably my article was a bit unclear on this point.

The connection between freedom of speech and privacy was just an example of how privacy affect other rights, too. I used it because I did not want to be too abstract. I used just one example, because I did not want to write too much on this. I wanted to write something that could be shared and read by a few people, rather than just hardcore privacy enthusiast.

Actually I really like your observations. Frankly this is another way (maybe a better one) to say what I was thinking:

>Privacy is about denying other people the information that they may use to obtain power over you in some way.

[stereolambda]

> I don't disagree with anything you said here, but it does not seem it contradicts what I am trying to say. Probably my article was a bit unclear on this point.

Maybe, maybe not: it always also depends on your reader how your message is read :) I only wanted to point out that the broad freedom of speech debate is by itself very complex nowadays. People have different stances, even if they think themselves broadly liberal (in the political science sense). I think there's some value in keeping the cause of privacy mostly unbundled from all this mess in the public conversation. This is a strategic opinion, not some profound philosophical disagreement, I think.

(I certainly see the problem that it's hard to show to many people convincingly, in their face, the importance of privacy. It's an abstract thing, like freedom or equality.)