privacy

A book is a private thing, citizen; it belongs to the one who writes it and to the one who reads it. Like the mind itself, a book is a private space. Within that space, anything is possible. The greatest evil and the greatest good.

There are skeletons in everyone's closet, things no one ever wants the world to discover.

We need to have a measure of love and freedom at all times, even with the ones we love much in our lives.

I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity.

Privacy is something you can sell, but you can't buy it back.

Questions are as supple as willow wands, it's easy to brush by them and slip them aside, and no one the worse for it.

Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

Personalization is based on a bargain. In exchange for the service of filtering, you hand large companies an enormous amount of data about your daily life--much of whic you might not trust your friends with.

Since the 1970s, there has been a continual tendency to over-estimate the surveillance capacities of new technologies. In the sense of the physical invasion of privacy, surveillance comprises five sequential events: the capacity to observe; the act of observation; comprehension of what is seen; intervention on the basis of that knowledge; and a consequent change of behaviour by the subject. Too often the final four have been assumed from the possibility of the first.

There are no secrets on the Internet

He didn__ have regular email like everyone else. He couldn__ afford that digital fingerprint that the NSA, the CIA, the FBI and all the other espionage alphabeticals counted on for their privacy-bashing surveillance of the entire formerly free world.

Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.

There are many ways to honor America. This book is mine. I have completed this journey of self-education in the belief that the most terrifying possibility since 9/11 has not been terrorism--as frightening as that is--but the prospect that Americans will give up their rights in pursuing the chimera of security.

The characters who go to make up my stories and novels are not portraits. Characters I invent along with the story that carries them. Attached to them are what I've borrowed, perhaps unconsciously, bit by bit, of persons I have seen or noticed or remembered in the flesh - a cast of countenance here, a manner of walking there, that jumps to the visualizing mind when a story is under way. I don't write by invasion into the life of a real person: my own sense of privacy is too strong for that; and I also know instinctively that living people to whom you are close - those known to you in ways too deep, too overflowing, ever to be plumbed outside love - do not yield to, could never fit into, the demands of a story. Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write most entirely out of yourself, that a character becomes in its own right another human being on the page.

When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.

On the corporate side, the upshot of our data (the benefit to us) isn't all that interesting unless you're an economist. In theory, your data means ads are better targeted, which means less marketing spend is wasted, which means lower prices. At the very least, the data they sell means you get to use genuinely useful services like Facebook and Google without paying money for them.

People feel uncomfortable when they have to divulge personal information during a police interrogation. Isn__ it strange that one-sixth of the world population spreads such information on social media?

Oh, tell me, who first declared, who first proclaimed that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own real interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else_ . Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child!