Privacy: Privacy (n.) The protection of data, information, or knowledge goods held and owned by an individual or a group, including physical, technical, or legal exclusions that defend that protection.
Wikipedia describes privacy as "the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively". This is a pretty good definition except that it fails to ask the ever-important question: why? Why do we value privacy? If there is no good answer to this, there is no good answer to the question, "does it matter when we lose our privacy?" Luckily, economics provides a solid answer. Privacy allows the owner of a data, information, or knowledge good to receive the appropriate market value for its sharing and reuse, or to benefit by excluding others from accessing that information good.
Abuses of privacy are violations of the exclusion, and use of an individual or a group's data, information, or knowledge goods without their permission and without due compensation. The abusers' motto "if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" is similar to the tyrant's motto "all property is theft", a rationale for organized expropriation of privacy by a more powerful group. Pieter's Privacy Postulate states that in any given society respect for privacy correlates to respect for freedom.
The economics-based analysis of privacy is based on the underlying analysis that society can be accurately understood as an data-information-knowledge processing machine constructed as a free market.
It is easy to test this hypothesis: would you accept $1m in exchange for your credit card records? How about $10m, or $100,000. As is clear, privacy has a monetary value. Violations of privacy are consider "unethical" because society respects, by definition, the economic value of data, information, and knowledge.
Finally, one can note that the definition of "data, information and knowledge goods" includes images, sounds, and other data about one's self. When an individual or group publishes data outside an agreed exclusion zone - e.g. by walking in the street - such data is considered as being put into the public domain. Thus, the question "what hat did the Queen wear at yesterday's parade" is not an invasion of privacy, while "what undergarments does she wear" is.
- City: City (n.) 1. A large urban center that is built by successive waves of upwardly-mobile immigrants and run by generations of political elites that hate immigrants. 2. A large collection of buildings maintained at expense to be optimal homes for cockroaches and rats. [power society trade]
- Music: Music (n.) Acoustic vibrations that resonate pleasurably with the brain. [mind]
- Survival: Survival (n.) The art of so far, so good. [epicfail]
- Government: Government (n.) A social structure that regulates trade and punishment. [ethics]
- Monopoly: Monopoly (n.) The resting point of unchecked corporate interests. [money power]
- Tolerance: Tolerance (n.) Acceptance of self. [you]
- Money: Money (n.) A token representing a share in a social contract between state and citizen. [money power]
- Silence: Silence (n.) The sound of something really terrible just about to happen. [epicfail]
- Time: Time (n.) The difference between yesterday and tomorrow. [chaos]
- Software: Software (n.) The expression of human stupidity in computer-executable form. [stupidity toys]
- Civilisation: Civilisation (n.) An extended holiday. [epicfail oil]
- Pessimist: Pessimist (n.) Someone who fears that life does have a point, but does not get it. [you]
- Optimist: Optimist (n.) Someone who either understands that life is pointless, or hopes that it is. [you]
- Pension: Pension (n.) Something your parents got. [greed money]
- Derivative: Derivative (n.) Maths used as economic warfare. [greed violence]
- Investment: Investment (n.) A form of wealth redistribution in which the rich convince the middle class to hand over their life savings in exchange for a temporary adrenalin rush. [money stupidity]
- Panic: Panic (n.) The realization that the bear is catching up on you. [food]
- Africa: Africa (n.) A large continent that acts as a prison for most of the world's poor black people. [disease power prison trade]
- Football: Football (n.) A primitive form of soccer. [sport]
- Fishing: Fishing (n.) A sport that unites the world's richest and poorest in pursuit of the same aquatic prey. [food sport]
- Insurance: Insurance (n.) A form of gambling in which the house always wins, even if it burns down. [money]
- Success: Success (n.) A temporary stay of defeat. [epicfail]
- Friday: Friday (n.) One of the greatest achievements of the modern trade union movement. [beer]
- Free Trade: Free trade (n.) An ideal economic system in which the powerful are free to define the terms of trade. [economics]
- Motherhood: Motherhood (n.) In which a woman gives up the stress and loneliness of a career for the comfort of family and children. Considered to be a state of failure by many feminists and politically correct thinkers. [female power]
- Feminism: Feminism (n.) The belief that women can be free only by being more masculine than men. [female power]
- Committee: Committee (n.) An organizational structure designed to prevent distressing amounts of initiative and change. [groups stupidity]
- Artificial intelligence: Artificial intelligence (n.) The extension of collective intelligence using technological solutions. [mind society]
- Us: Us (n.) Everyone except you. [you]
- Internet: Internet (n.) A bunch of tubes, run by pirates, which strangled the music industry. [communications mind]
- Truth: Truth (n) That which, when the lies and inaccuracies are removed, remains. [truth]
- Random: Random (adj.) Measured with insufficient accuracy. [chaos truth]
- Journalism: Journalism (n.) A form of fiction in which the lies are well disguised. [fiction]
- Unemployment: Unemployment (n.) A type of social exclusion that is worse than some forms of slavery. [money society]
- Employment: Employment (n.) A form of slavery that is better than most of the alternatives. [money]
- Guilt: Guilt (n.) An illogical regret at having gotten away with it. [stupidity]
- Battery: Battery (n.) Portable civilization. [technology]
- Car: Car (n.) The best argument against economic development. [stupidity]
- Backup: Backup (n.) Like experience, something you don't have when you actually need it. [stupidity technology]
- Computer: Computer (n.) A convenient place to store all your precious data, before it crashes. [technology]