Is Anonymity a Right?

[RicInOR]

Do you have the right to be Anonymous?

Are there circumstances where you would give up that right?

Or, is it a privilege?



"Before co-founding the DNA Doe Project with Fitzpatrick in 2017, Press worked on finding parentage in adoption cases. (Fitzpatrick left in June to spend more time on IdentiFinders.) Both in adoption and in Jane and John Doe searches, the ethical questions are the same, says Press, including "whose rights trumps whose." In the case of adoption, the primary question is whether an adoptee's right to know their history trumps a birth parent's right to privacy. Press believes it does. Although she finds it "sad" that sperm donors and birth parents may have been promised that they would never be named, she says she believes "anonymity is not a right."

Longer read:

The man without a name

Robert Ivan Nichols simply disappeared from his average, 1960s Midwestern life — until, using DNA, sleuths uncovered the truth. But were they digging where they shouldn’t have been?

www.vox.com

Read More

 

[sobo]

Do you have the right to be Anonymous?

Are there circumstances where you would give up that right?

Or, is it a privilege?

Yes.
Maybe. It depends.
No, it should never be. It should be a right.

 

[WAW44]

No right is absolute . Every right can be violated. In most cases law provides limited protection and more strenuous penalty for violation of a right after the fact. By then, the cat is out of the bag thou. Add to this a scenario where law is behind technology and average morality of a society , and the hole gets even bigger . So, short answer, it makes no difference in this case and today's environment .

 

[Dinglenutz]

Do you have the right to be Anonymous?

I think we need to define terms. In the absolute case, no. In the limited case outlined in the OP, maybe. Sometimes yes.

 

[sobo]

In the limited case outlined in the OP, maybe.

Respectfully disagree with this. The donors and birth parents were promised that their names would never be released. That's a promise that should not ever be broken.
So I can't agree with a "maybe" in the limited case outlined in the OP.

 

[RicInOR]

A lot of us are old enough - Adults before the Internet - that we could have done things with an expectation of privacy.

Like having been sperm doners - for money (not the kind that sleep & run)

Now, today, you could be tracked down.
Could you be held responsible for financial considerations for those offspring?

Say one of those had huge medical bills as a minor. Could you be sued for the debt?

--- ---

How about the other kind - the dead beat dad / went out for smokes type
Could they be held responsible for financial considerations for those offspring?


--- ---

How about those who are victims of abuse?

 

[Dinglenutz]

Respectfully disagree with this.

I'd mostly agree, but it's not a right. It's a contractual obligation.

 

[sobo]

Yeah, I'd agree with that. It's contractual. So, if violated, sue the bastards!

 

[WAW44]

This case would be less with anonymity and more with the contract you entered into when making the donation. That contract should have spelled out what happens and who is on the hook .

A lot of us are old enough - Adults before the Internet - that we could have done things with an expectation of privacy.

Like having been sperm doners - for money (not the kind that sleep & run)

Now, today, you could be tracked down.
Could you be held responsible for financial considerations for those offspring?

Say one of those had huge medical bills as a minor. Could you be sued for the debt?

--- ---

How about the other kind - the dead beat dad / went out for smokes type
Could they be held responsible for financial considerations for those offspring?


--- ---

How about those who are victims of abuse?

 

[RicInOR]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Genealogy/comments/icsh11

 

[MannyGlocks]

Leftists loath absolutes.

 

[Dinglenutz]

In reality a lot of things are nuanced. The current thing, anonymity, is a good example. It's not a right, but there are rights that are adjacent to it. The OP is a great example of it being nuanced. The parties to the original contract are bound by those obligations, but that doesn't mean 3rd parties have to be also bound by obligations they didn't sign on for, including this one.

So if someone engages an investigator who then acts in a way that's not otherwise illegal and causes information to be disclosed that the parties were obliged to keep secret, I don't see that as any sort of issue at all, assuming no laws were broken.

We don't have any right for people to not know us. People accustomed to modern big city life have been functionally anonymous for several decades most of the time, but that's a fairly recent innovation and certainly not a right. Everyone knows everyone in a small village, and that's a lot closer to the natural state of humanity than the teeming masses of today's city. On the other hand things that we do in privacy, in situations where we would have a reasonable expectation that they be private, should stay private. That's a right people have always expected to have respected.

We have entered an age when the issue I see isn't privacy or anonymity, but rather an asymmetry in access to public information. We might want to deal with that.

 

[whitney]

Snipped Diglenutz' quote.

We have entered an age when the issue I see isn't privacy or anonymity, but rather an asymmetry in access to public information. We might want to deal with that.

^^^This right here^^^
How do we deal with access to public information? If you look at this in simplest terms the government agencies holding public information do a poor job of protecting it. The Veterans Administration lost a laptop with thousands of names, the court system in Washington did a poor job of protecting access to the digital records, and the most recent one I can think of is WDFW licensee data was illegally accessed revealing personal information of everyone who purchased a license in the last few years.

The government agencies who are entrusted with protecting this data being compromised will say they are doing the best they can or we will strive to do better. That is totally unacceptable and is merely an excuse for the deficiencies they fail to address. Unfortunately once your data is out "in the wild" there is nothing you can do after the fact and you have no recourse.

You are required in most cases to "voluntarily" submit your data to agencies like WDFW and your local gun store /FFL or you are not "allowed" to participate. Read as, you have no way to opt out of the government contract.

I have been working on my elected representative to enact legislation whereby you have a right to be "forgotten" in the sense that you can take control of your public information. The idea is simple really, execution is horrible and I need some help figuring it out.

The basic premise is - I move out of the state of Washington, the state no longer has any use for the publicly held information they have regarding me. This includes the WDFW data base which I request to have my information removed from, as well as the record of firearms sales in my name. I'm not sure if court records can actually be deleted but in the case of WDFW and the sales records Washington has no need for this data any longer. Your voting record is also public information so it should also fall into the same request method.

Questions:
1. How do you execute with minimum bureaucracy?
2. What other records does the state have that can be forgotton/deleted?
3. How do we control the information collected?

My apologies to @RicInOR but I believe his question with regard to right of anonymity falls right in line with this. You should have the ability to "opt out". The idea of weather it is a right or not will likely be debated to no end.

~Whitney

 

[PaulB47]

There are no rights. There is only will.

 

[Dinglenutz]

Questions:
1. How do you execute with minimum bureaucracy?
2. What other records does the state have that can be forgotton/deleted?
3. How do we control the information collected?

One solution is we go tiny village. Everyone can access all public data, about anyone, from anywhere, any time. That might seem unwise, but if it's intolerable those who make the rules will be experiencing the discomfort just like everyone else. I would bet something gets fixed.

Either that, or knowing everything public about everyone makes us all appreciate that everyone is flawed, sort of a MAD system of personal information. We go back to essentially being a gigantic tiny village.

As for how to execute a fix, the lightest way would probably involve personal cryptokeys to make everything only readable when WE say it's readable. But that would enable people to really royally screw themselves so probably not suitable for the general population.