Human Rights are non TRANSFERABLE

Privacy is a human right and human rights are not transferable.

So YOU cannot decide that *I* waive my right to 'no punishment without judicial process' and YOU cannot waive MY right on MY behalf not to be tortured, and YOU cannot waive MY right to privacy and so on.

They may think its best based on some vague concept of 'general medical good', but then again, everyone always does until their own privacy is violated.

Once they realize the privacy violation DIRECTLY AFFECTS THEMSELVES then suddenly they start screaming stalkers, or like MPs, they're blacking out their expenses claims, their number plates, their homes from Google Street View, taking their childrens name from Contactpoint, and so on.

For example, CCTV, ask people if they support CCTV to prevent crime, they say yes. Then their neighbours put a CCTV pointing to their gardens to record noisey behaviour and they're outraged! The penny doesn't drop till they see how invasive it is to THEM personally.

I also note it's the lack of empathy. If I am a researcher checking 'Human Fin Rot' and I think I'm never going to get 'Human Fin Rot' then I don't empathize and hence don't feel the need to protect THEIR/My privacy, because I don't see it as mine.

On the other hands, if I had AIDS and was researching AIDS I would not in a million years think it was OK to start revealing who has AIDS for some greater good.

And I notice that the more broken a society is, the less empathy with their fellow man, and the more likely they are to approve invasive intrusive privacy violations.... just as long as in their minds, it's EVERYONE ELSE that is the subject.

So to me, the less a society understands the fundamental rights, the more broken they are, the more fragmented, the more incohesive a society is.

Trust

So much of this is really about trust. A couple of decades ago, if you'd have been given a survey and asked to fill it in by the Doctor, you'd probably have done it. The Doctor, in most peoples experience was someone they could trust, and if no name was asked, what was the problem. Even private enterprise was more trusted; a company asking your opinion of their service probably wouldn't even ask for name, postcode etc.

Wind the clock forward and it's all changed; virtually no-one is trusted, for the perfectly good reason that 8 times out of 10 that trust is in some way abused. Whether it's some health authority knocking up behaviour profiles on the quiet, or a business selling on your details of behaviour to marketers. The greedy and arrogant just can't keep their fingers out of the pie.

Thanks in part to phorm and the NHS (sounds odd in one sentence!), I now object to pretty much every use of my data or behaviour that isn't explicitly laid out for me to consider and give my assent to. Most I'll never know about, and that really does piss me off.

Till we get an enforceable, tough policy for data use that returns control to us, I'll object to every use, good or bad, and actively try to avoid them. If we can't be trusted to make our own informed decisions, why should we trust those of others?