Spying on someone might not inherently be an aggression against a person but to actually do it you probably are going to violate property in practice.

You don't have an expectation of not being recorded when you walk out on the street, or into someone else's establishment. But if joe schmoe wants to secretly install cameras in YOUR house, he's going to need to violate your property to do so.

Obviously there are still cases such as bathrooms etc where social norms fill in the details.

It's not a cop out, I'm not attempting to avoid discussion of private spying. It's just pointing out the reality that you have a lot more to worry about from state surveillance. You don't worry about changing your oil filter when you're driving 100MPH down the highway and your engine catches on fire.

industrial spying is a little bit different since there is alot of value in it and its not affecting my privacy. on the customer end there is value in tracking purchasing patterns etc but most of that is opt-in or reasonably easy to opt out of. employers spying on employers *secretly* is a nonissue i would think. there is little value in it, its presumably quite costly and the downside is big.

just wondering, what options do I have in an AC setting to stop someone from ruining my reputation?

The responsibility is on you for something you wish to be private to stay private.

In practice this would mean that adding a no-bathroom-recording (in generalized form) would be added to the contract between road owners and gas stations and thus between road users and the roads owners (or something equivalent). And maybe even as a standard clause in any private contracting network.

behave good imo, decent folks typically dont have bad reputations.

No, because that rape is an act of aggression... video/audio/tracking is not. Nether of those things is forcing you to do a particular thing with your property.

My thoughts on what this would look like in AC/minarchy:

The employer wouldn't have to tell you about it, it'd just be widely considered to be a dumb move that could easily spiral into crippling your business if it were found that you were audio/video/tracing employees without their knowledge. The market would decide how far "out of bounds" you went.

Employees are free to pay to have their devices "checked" for bugs/taps. 99% of the time I suspect people would think it weren't worth it because they'd assume that 99.9% of employers wouldn't do that because it'd look horrendous for them if it were exposed... none the less though, the employee is allowed to decide what level of risk he'd like to take on.

In the event there were wide reportings of employers regularly getting caught doing this sort of thing then it would help create a market for "checking your devices". If only around 1 in a million employers did this and they were viewed as an "exception and not the rule" than I suspect it'd cost a lot more to get your devices "checked".

They might want to go the secret route if they think they can gain by implementing anti-privacy policies much greater than their competitors (atleast what is known publicly about their competitors) but think it would be too unpopular with employees to tell them about it.

And I think you got thingees a little backwards here. We were talking about possible rights of privacy, and how such rights may or may not interact logically with possible rights of property. The question isn't how some already given sense of property rights can be stretched and strained to somehow create some derivative subsidiary rights of privacy.

How are these two prospective rights related? That question still hasn't even been discussed. Over the course of human history all sorts of societies did not have the concept of "property rights" at all, or their ideas along these lines are and were so different and as far as Libertarians (&etc) so weak that they could be said the "barely" have property rights. A majority of human history could easily be included in that category, depending on how one defines "property" and "rights".

Are Libertarians (&etc) really going to argue that all those different societies without their "flavor" or strong property rights, perhaps the majority of human existence, that those people had no concept of privacy rights? Are Libertarians (&etc) really going their flavor of "property rights" is either a necessary or sufficient condition logically for rights to privacy to exist? And again, does the person who owns no property have no rights under Libertarianism (&etc)?

Well sure their are easier ways, a wealthy perv can just buy up an existing business and order the extra cameras installed out of a catalog. LOL do you really think your typical boss got there by working 18 hour days as startups ???? Some of you dudes really do live in fantasy land. OK, what percentage of bosses do you really think "earned" their way 18 hours at a time, 90%, 70%, 51%, or were you just coming up with a reverse "strawman" to use for yourself.

And I always love the Kumbaya hippy-happy face of Libertarian (&etc). Sure bosses actively abuse every "statist" law to invade workers privacy right now, but hey... if we switch to LiberLand, and give those exact same bosses even more power, well in that case... it seems "like an odd thing to do" for a boss, why would they want to do that? Don't worry they all of a sudden won't in LiberLand, because Kumbaya, Kumbaya, Kumbaya... it's LiberLand, Duh!

The reason people bring up these "border condition" cases is to show the holes in the LiberLogic. And every time it is the hand-waive well they just wouldn't want to anymore, why do you ask non-answers... LOL,LOL,LOL!!!

I'd actually be interested to hear more about this. For instance, should the government have stepped in to stop this?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/us...acebook&st=cse

As long as libertarians endorse an absolute right to contract, they're saddled with defending the enforceability of even the most distasteful contracts, including when those contracts abridge other rights that society recognizes. Cf. Walter Block on slave contracts. Moreover, libertarians don't recognize the existence of a general "right to privacy" capable of contravening obligations they consider legitimate. A libertarian would only recognize a right to privacy as an emergent phenomenon of a system of property rights (e.g. the right to exclude others from one's home).

Thus, depending on perspective, libertarians might consider the Blackberry example to be contingent on any of the following factors: (1) whether employer or employee ultimately has title to the phone; (2) whether there is a contract between the two providing for tracking by GPS (and the terms of that contract); (3) where and when the tracking occurs (e.g., no right to track the person outside the scope of employment). I don't think any of these considerations are necessarily unreasonable, though I disagree that it would illegitimate for society to recognize a generalized right to privacy.

Wow, I can't wait for ACland, so I can "loan" my hot neighbor a device that secretly videos her in the shower and bedroom. Best place ever!

Doesn't every smart phone on the market already have GPS tracking capabilities built in? Don't most providers already market features that allow you to track the phone's location using GPS? The employer wouldn't be "bugging" the device. He would just be using features that are already a part of the phone. I guess there's a question as to whether the employee was aware that the model of phone he was issued has this feature, but who's responsibility is it to inform the employee? The employer? RIM? Verizon?

Also, this is already happening out there. This case in NY is obviously a breach of privacy in that the employer surreptitiously planted a tracking device on his employee's personal (as in not issued to him by the employer) car, but the technology and incentives are there for employers to do this.

http://www.nyclu.org/news/nyclu-file...s-personal-car

Bingo. And as long as the dogmatically insist that any contract is, by definition "voluntary", and then by definition, wasn't made under any coercion what-so-ever and society as a whole has a moral obligation to enforce that contract by violence, like this...

They are saddled with the logical conclusion that these distasteful, morally repugnant and bankrupt, contracts would be relatively easy for people to be coerced into without immediate and direct use or threat of violence.

And we don't even have to drag out that old canard of slavery. Slavery isn't even bad according to some Libertarians (&etc) anyway. We can just use the The Most Dangerous Game.

Simple business model in LiberLand... get a used yacht with helicopter pad and a used helicopter-gunship, hire some goons. Then just anchor that yacht off shore off of poverty/war/disaster areas safely in international waters. Now just helicopter in and offer the survivors/natives/victims this "voluntary contract": 2000 lbs of transport, things or people, via helicopter and yacht, to Los Angeles for each contestant who signs up to play the game unarmed.

As long as there is a customer base (the other armed contestants and/or worldwide viewers), and disasters keep happening, this is a completely moral, legal, and viable business under Libertarianism (&etc) moral and legalistic code. Amirite?

OK let me guess... in LiberLand people just wouldn't act this way... Kumbaya, Kumbaya, Kumbaya...

lmao

missiledog, everyone. he'll be performing all day.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

Does someone need a "good reason" to stop doing business with you?

That's has nothing to do with anything.

I think pvn was talking about someone following their employee to a bar to see if he's an alcoholic and then firing him. It's got to do with privacy and stuff.

The much bigger issue, beyond interesting but necessarily fruitless arguments about what ought to be, is that without a strong government, we have no effective way to prosecute these violations, regardless of what rules we have in place. Law is an abstraction that allows us to forget lower level mechanisms for engineering order, but when you assume a society that specifically lacks those dirty mechanisms, one then must fill in the details as well. Furthermore, it's historically rare that those mechansims function well enough that we can forget about them and just worry about the law instead, even under limited circumstances. In this case, the nature of privacy makes it effectively impossible to prove that violations of privacy have occurred without violating privacy. Furthermore, since law enforcement in general requires ability to violate privacy, competition in law enforcement leads to an arms race in privacy violations.

The main reason that effective standards for proof of guilt can be so high in our society is that prosecution is easy in an orderly society that gives government agents both considerable respect and power. Historically, weaker governments use lower standards, because the lower your ability to successfully prosecute and the lower the respect for authority, the lower your standards must be to provide for the necessary level of deterrence. This can be seen in international politics, where the conditions are largely anarchistic and mere accusations can be pretext for war.

Police states, whether under Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, Fascist Italy or the Committee of Public Safety, then are all inevitable results of the need to produce order under anarchistic circumstances. Communist regimes, for instance, tend to be also police states for the simple reason that their legitimacy is dependent upon anarchistic forces (specifics depend on the regime, but nearly all communist regimes have endorsed the idea of violent revolutions, both by rhetoric and action). It's easy to blame the bad guys who end up at the top, but social and political forces were such that instability was only conquered by a brutal regime. Ultimately, we choose our government - a population that can only be ruled by brutality, will eventually engineer the brute. In this sense, there's not much difference between extreme anti-authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Further illustrating this, we have an ACist argument in this thread for a defense of institutional invasion of privacy well beyond what's practiced by states.

Did he damage any property (Facebook's?) or do bodily harm?

Not that I can tell. I was just intrigued by the suggestion a couple posters were making that property rights could be extended to include one's "reputation" which reminded me of that article I'd recently read about a case where police investigators subpoenaed Facebook and Comcast in order to determine the home addresses of some kids who created the fake facebook page, presumably to protect the reputation of the kid they were impersonating online.

How did this ever get to spying, and an employees right to withhold information? A supervisor doesn't need an employees permission to review any paperwork submitted. And shouldn't require any permission to know where that employee is during the work day. If that includes a GPS tracker in a phone, car, or lizard spy chip under the skin, the employee has voluntarily agreed to be "on call" for the employer during all agreed hrs of the work day.

There is no difference than if the employer hired a runner to follow the employee during the work day as an assistant, and whos job included periodic check ins.

And if the employer asks that the employee also have the phone during non-work hours?

are they "on call"

ty, tyvm (fig-its with tie)... rimshot.wav

I can tell you some bitter stuff from real world experience regarding this particular issue. Bottom line... minimum wage laws do not apply, common decency, as well as modern medical science. At least not in Cali.