It is also not a great epicenter of tech entrepreneurship.
Perhaps a stable society where people are protected from overbearing authority is more valuable than making a couple of extra dollars today. It is definitely more valuable than a slightly smaller cell phone or a website where you can share 140 character messages with your friend.
There are bigger risks to business than some employees posting a few internal word documents to Yahoo Finance. The worldwide financial crisis was not due to inadequate monitoring of employees' personal e-mail, after all.
I simply disagree that privacy on workplace computers is worth more than money or smaller phones. I see no greater good being traded for the drag on businesses. If you want workplace privacy, you can provide it for yourself, and you can avoid jobs where intense monitoring is a reasonable condition, such as R&D on the industry's most secret products.
I don't know what the worldwide financial crisis has to do with this, but intensive workplace privacy laws would have hurt the investigation and wind-down of fraudulently priced contracts, not helped it. Hey, you brought it up.
If you want workplace privacy, you can provide it for yourself, and you can avoid jobs where intense monitoring is a reasonable condition, such as R&D on the industry's most secret products.
Can you? Can the majority of people make the right decision here?
It's illegal to sell your child to someone. Why is it legal to sell your privacy?
I don't think it is. People will often trade something for money that they really shouldn't. If a person has $a and wants $b, and someone will give them $b in exchange for $a, people will often give up $a regardless of the long-term consequences.
Apparently selling children was a problem for society, so it is generally not legal now. People made the wrong decision, and it hurt society, so now making the wrong decision is no longer an option, and our society is better for it.
I think selling your privacy for a salary is detrimental to society in the same way, so it makes sense to use the legal system to remove the option. Then employees can't be tempted into making bad decisions with respect to their privacy by their employer, or rather, by the threat of non-employment. Plus, people that care about their privacy will no longer have to be off-the-grid wackos, and their value to society is increased as a result.
So you think people are stupid enough that they cannot decide whether selling their privacy is a good decision, therefore the government should make this decision for them?
How about health..we know that people are so stupid that they will sell their health for food (eat cheap fast food that is horrible for their health). Should we ban fast food?
May be we should let people decide what people are comfortable with.
May be we should let people decide what people are comfortable with.
The problem is when people stop caring about privacy because so many others made that decision for them, and the choice completely disappears. I would want to ban fast food if all healthy food became unavailable as a result of its popularity.
Perhaps a stable society where people are protected from overbearing authority is more valuable than making a couple of extra dollars today. It is definitely more valuable than a slightly smaller cell phone or a website where you can share 140 character messages with your friend.
There are bigger risks to business than some employees posting a few internal word documents to Yahoo Finance. The worldwide financial crisis was not due to inadequate monitoring of employees' personal e-mail, after all.