[hug]

To provide some clarity on my own position, I understand and echo your desire to have a society in which our quiet moments are not intruded upon. I am not arguing that the expectation that you not be monitored is unreasonable. What I am saying is that these feelings do not line up in a tidy way with the words “private” and “public”.

In all versions of modern English that I’m aware of, “public” is an antonym of “private”. In all conversations around this topic, they are often treated as though they are not. There’s an intuition gap that you rely on your conversational partner to cross. What you do is say “I have a right to privacy, and by privacy I do not mean literally private, I mean incidentally non-public, due to circumstance”, only not in so many words. It’s the way I talk about it as well, because there’s no well understood and unambiguous way to describe what I just called “incidentally non-public”.

Assuming, of course, that you accept that public and private are antonyms, you can demonstrate this intuition gap by instead of talking about public and private, using another pair of antonyms and talking about up and down, and instead ask the question: Does everyone have the right to be up while down?

That’s obviously a terrible and nonsensical question, but I feel it is exactly what some people read when they encounter someone’s desire for privacy in public. How can you be private in public? How can you be up while down?

This isn’t sophistry or maliciousness: it’s a real way that real people interpret the conversation. Failure to recognise the intuition gap is what leads to a failure to understand the other person you’re talking to.

[godelski]

If you're getting into the definition of public vs private you also need to consider what constitutes a reasonable expectation. Not just from our current reference frame of everyone having phones and every business having cameras, but from a few decades ago as well as a century, or more, ago. What may constitute a reasonable expectation today may be extremely divorced from that of when the laws were written. I love the nuance you are getting into, but I do think it needs to be taken at least one step further for a good conversation to take place. People are working with different assumptions and not communicating these well and results in very different versions of reasonable expectation. 50 years ago, even 20, it was pretty reasonable to assume that you could not, let along would not, be recorded unless you were involved in a large public demonstration. I think if we're getting down to public vs private that we should also consider this aspect. And I think we should recognize the difference between a private activity within a public space from a public activity within a public space. The ecosystem has changed and with it we must be a bit more nuanced.

[hug]

The definition is at its root: “private” is by nature privative: it is essentially defined by what isn’t. If privacy includes “not being observed”, “not being recorded” and “not being overheard” it is hard to have a conversation around asserting the right to privacy, when some of those rights are violated indeliberately and necessarily by virtue of you just being in view or earshot of another person.

The thing you touch on at the end—not quite privity, not quite secrecy, not quite privacy—is the thing I wish I had a word for.

It’s exactly this ur-privacy, though, that people find missing in their lives and are trying to express a well understood, if cloudy, desire for. It’s also something that I tend to agree with the various European governments on, despite my annoyance at the “I know it when I see it” nature of the thing.

[godelski]

I think this is because it is more nuanced that you, or most people, are giving credit to. Privacy is not a binary option of private vs public but rather a continuum. This is where "reasonable expectation" falls and tries to create a division, a third option. But I think we need more since the environment has changed. As an example, if in a public place you pull yourself and your friend to a dark corner that's obscured you have increased your expectation of privacy. Because you're literally "hiding." The extreme of this might be a public bathroom where you definitely do have a legal expectation of privacy despite being a public place.

So the problem here is that we're trying to make clear cut discriminators when the world has gotten a lot messier. Unfortunately legal systems require discretization, because it is easier to legislate clear boundaries (laws are piecewise functions -- if-then-else). But the world is messy and it needs to be recognized that those discrete boundaries are fuzzy too (i.e. they are guides, not hard fixed and objective boundaries). Probably also coupled with human propensity to discretize continuous variables due to the compression effects. This really is why we have many "know it when I see it" definitions rather than hard rules and you may notice that as complexity is increasing (making this more common) and so is the disagreement with said loose definitions. Then we have a core problem of communication breaking down because everyone is working off a different set of assumptions, assuming everyone else has the same assumptions, and unwilling to accept other bases because our assumptions are objectively generated ;)