This is largely a response to Chris Shaw's post.

Chris, there is a huge difference between privacy rights of the individual and demands of "publically elected officals" to intrude into those individual privacy rights, possibly for the purose of preserving the hegemony of the related bureaucrats.

By definition, "elected officals" are there by dint of individual requirements for their (i.e. the individual's) sovereign rights to be cared for - supposedly, by persons formally qualified for the task.

The real difference you are delineating is that between an individual's right to privacy and the requirement for public disclosure and transparency in the bureaucratic decision-making process.

This, then, raises the issue of adequate Freedom of Information laws that parallel the issues we are here discussing.

Both matters are intimately related and both fall on the side of being "fair and reasonable" in effect.

(Note that we have not yet touched upon the legal areas of contractual confidentialty and fairness, which are the very foundations of our legal system.

"If you have done nothing wrong, why do you have anything to fear."

Simply because I don't want to assume that someone else will not choose to do wrong with information about me which they might not otherwise be entitled to.

Fozzy, forget Mirko opening the article with "his annual salary and medical history " - bank account details and passwords please.

If the answer from Mirko is "no thanks" (or a variation of that) then we have established the transaction, now we haggle over the price.

What are reasonable boundaries on privacy?

R0bert

I don't see any evidence that tolerance towards homosexuals, the mentally ill, or those inflicted with the AIDS virus was developed simply by putting people's private details on show. Any developments on these fronts were due to a complex process of social change not through individuals being forced to divulge their most tightly held secrets.

It is laughable to think that anyone in the world, struggling or not, would not protest if their privacy was compromised. After all, isn't dignity and respect important to every community?

I'll take this one as satire.

Wanting to destroy privacy between the citizen and state means that you want people to be pawns of an authoritarian government whose rights can be removed at will. This author is an extremely corrupt individual, or breathtakingly ignorant.

Sometimes privacy is a little burdensome and inefficient for governments but that's all you can say about it.

Fozzy: "Mirko Bagaric should commence his post with his annual salary and medical history"

If Mirko looses his privacy and you don't loose yours it doesn't work, and obviously no one would accept it, yet that is what you ask for. It is unreasonable. Try to understand what he is proposing.

Doc Holliday: "Who watches the watchers?"

In a word: you. Because you know as much about the watchers as they do about you. If you don't it doesn't work.

Steel: "Wanting to destroy privacy between the citizen and state means that you want people to be pawns of an authoritarian government whose rights can be removed at will. This author is an extremely corrupt individual, or breathtakingly ignorant."

There are a fair few breathtakingly ignorant points in that one statement Steel, but the one that really gets me is your assumption you have some sort of privacy from the government now. They know what you earn, your medical history, where you live, where you work, what you drive, and what pharmaceuticals you purchase. They photograph you on most major roads, know all your traffic infringements, what cars you drive and how much you drive it. They can legally obtain your credit history, tap your phone calls, watch your movements, and see everything you purchase and where you got it from using your bank statements. The icing on the cake is that every few years some bad apple in the public service decides to make a buck by selling this information.

But that is not the worst of it. With the anti-terror mania sweeping our society, we have given them the power to collect all this information and study it, looking for chinks in your armour. As the Haneef example shows us they have no qualms about leaking what they find to the press when it suits them. Yet they insist we let them do this in private, armed with press gag orders and control orders no one is supposed to talk about. Mirko's proposal is about redressing that imbalance, not making it worse.

This is undoubtedly a serious issue, and deserves serious treatment.

But the author does not appear to discriminate between the various – very important – levels of privacy that need to be considered.

"If there were less privacy, criminals would find it harder to plot harmful acts (hundreds of crimes have been thwarted by closed-circuit television)"

If the CCTV is in a public space, or if I am a company protecting my property through the use of CCTV, there is a strong case to be made that the right to privacy cannot exist in this environment.

However, if the CCTV is used, say, by a swimming pool to monitor activity in the changerooms, I would suggest that this trips over the line between security – detecting wrongdoers – and privacy, in this case a personal preference to take ones clothes off without being spied upon.

Clearly, generalizations are not going to work here.

But that's all we are given.

“We would be better placed to make informed investment decisions (no more tiresome "commercial in confidence" conversation-stoppers) and know more about the real agendas of our politicians.”

“Commercial in Confidence” is a bastion, a bulwark, a mainstay of business dealings. To believe otherwise, you must never have been closer to a real, functioning, commercial business than buying milk at the corner store.

Here's the deal. I walk into the Boardroom one sunny morning and declare to the Board “we should make a takeover bid for Woolworths”. How would that work, asks the Board, and I outline my – quite brilliant – plan to them. Sounds good, they say, and send me off on “commercial in confidence” discussions with Woolworths.

At what point does the public – in this case Woolworths' shareholders, shareholders in my company, the Stock Exchange, the press, the ACCC, ASIC and so on ad infinitum – have the right to the contents of my plan?

The trick here is to be clear about what is covered by the label, not the outlawing of the act itself

However, when it comes to politicians...

But that would be a generalization.